[webkit-dev] WTF::fastMalloc

[Martin Robinson]

On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 11:33 AM, Geoffrey Garen <ggaren at apple.com> wrote:
>> A 5% regression in page load performance seems pretty serious.
>
> I’m assuming you’re considering the GTK port here, and not the end-of-life Qt port.
>
> Are you up for some engineering work to adopt a better malloc for GTK?

I appreciate your offer!

> Here’s a rough task list:
>
> (1) Define a canonical GTK platform we’ll use for performance measurement.

Perhaps the University of Szeged team has some insight into what
platforms they used for comparing allocator performance.

> (1) Refactor GTK APIs so that API-level objects are not allocated/deleted by global operator new/delete in WebCore+JavaScriptCore.
>         (1a) Either build the API layer as a separate library from WebCore+JavaScriptCore,
>         (1b) or specifically annotate each object at the API library with a per-class operator new / operator delete.

I don't think this should be a problem. Currently all allocations of
API-level objects happen with the GLib slab allocator (or system
malloc/free, given the right environment arguments).

> (2) Find a fast secure random number API on the canonical GTK platform.

I can look into this.

> (3) Find a fast thread-specific data API on the canonical GTK platform.

Threading for GTK+ on non-Mac/non-Windows platforms is essentially
pthreads. It probably wouldn't be a lot of work to defer to Windows
and Mac implementations on those platforms.

--Martin