On 11/03/2012 10:28 AM, Matteo Bruni wrote:
2012/11/3 Steaphan Greene<steap...@gmail.com>:
On 11/03/2012 09:04 AM, Matteo Bruni wrote:
2012/11/2 Steaphan Greene<steap...@gmail.com>:
Running a game in wine showed it performing terribly.  I traced this to
the
fact that it allocates and deallocates tiny memory chunks over and over
(I
suspect it's in C++ and passing things by value everywhere).  This led to
huge stalls because the heap bins weren't fine-grained enough (these
differed in size in steps of 8 bytes, but the bins differed by 16+, so it
spent a lot of time searching each bin for a bigger block).  I added more
fine-grained sizes to the smaller end of this, and now it runs faster in
wine than it does natively. :)

This was run on Debian squeeze, amd64.

Note, this is my first submission to wine in nearly 15 years.  So, of
course, everything has changed with how this works now.  Hope I have this
all right.

---
   dlls/ntdll/heap.c |    4 +++-
   1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/dlls/ntdll/heap.c b/dlls/ntdll/heap.c
index a9044714..eb7406b 100644
--- a/dlls/ntdll/heap.c
+++ b/dlls/ntdll/heap.c
@@ -116,7 +116,9 @@ C_ASSERT( sizeof(ARENA_LARGE) % LARGE_ALIGNMENT == 0
);
   /* Max size of the blocks on the free lists */
   static const SIZE_T HEAP_freeListSizes[] =
   {
-    0x10, 0x20, 0x30, 0x40, 0x60, 0x80, 0x100, 0x200, 0x400, 0x1000,
~0UL
+    0x10, 0x18, 0x20, 0x28, 0x30, 0x38, 0x40, 0x48, 0x50, 0x58, 0x60,
0x68,
+    0x70, 0x78, 0x80, 0x88, 0x90, 0x98, 0xA0, 0xA8, 0xB0, 0xB8, 0xC0,
0xC8,
+    0xD0, 0xD8, 0xE0, 0E88, 0xF0, 0xF8, 0x100, 0x200, 0x400, 0x1000,
~0UL
   };
   #define HEAP_NB_FREE_LISTS
(sizeof(HEAP_freeListSizes)/sizeof(HEAP_freeListSizes[0]))
That 0E88 looks quite wrong ;)

Apart from that, although I'm not an expert for this code, this patch
looks reasonable to me. Maybe we don't want so many free lists, but I
don't see big downsides for that (e.g. the linear search can be
replaced by a binary search, if need be). Maybe adding a smaller list
at the start (e.g. 0x8) makes sense too?

Yep, that's a typo.  Don't know how that got past me.  Sorry.  Should I
resend a corrected version?

Yes. You should also add a (try 2) to the email subject.

Done.


I did try with fewer (every 16 instead of every 8), and, though it was still
a dramatic improvement, it was still slow.
I was thinking about e.g. going every 16 after 0x80, or some similar
pseudo-exponential growing, but that really depends on the allocation
pattern of the applications.

That might be fine, though I haven't found any evidence that this number of bins has any significant downside other than one pointer per bin per heap, which seems tiny for the gains it produces. It does search them linearly, which, as you mention, is easy to fix with a binary search, but this number is still so small, it's really not that significant.

With a larger number of bins, it might be more of an issue, but if it were also setup with a regular pattern of bins, then finding the right bin could be a simple O(1) calculation, and even faster than a binary search.

I might be curious enough right now to implement that whole thing myself, if it's desired.


Speaking of which, it might be a nice followup patch to add some free
lists usage stats, to get some idea of what different applications do
in that regard.

Well, my code instrumentation consisted of fprintf()s, which I redirected through grep, sort, and uniq. So, I don't have anything sophisticated to share on that end.


--
Steaphan Greene<steap...@gmail.com>



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