Before this commit, GeneralPurposeAllocator could run into incredibly degraded performance in scenarios where the bucket count for a particular size class grew to be large. For example, if exactly `slot_count` allocations of a single size class were performed and then all of them were freed except one, then the bucket for those allocations would have to be kept around indefinitely. If that pattern of allocation were done over and over, then the bucket list for that size class could grow incredibly large.
This allocation pattern has been seen in the wild: Vexu/arocc#508 (comment)
In that case, the length of the bucket list for the `128` size class would grow to tens of thousands of buckets and cause Debug runtime to balloon to ~8 minutes whereas with the c_allocator the Debug runtime would be ~3 seconds.
To address this, there are three different changes happening here:
1. std.Treap is used instead of a doubly linked list for the lists of buckets. This takes the time complexity of searchBucket [used in resize and free] from O(n) to O(log n), but increases the time complexity of insert from O(1) to O(log n) [before, all new buckets would get added to the head of the list]. Note: Any data structure with O(log n) or better search/insert/delete would also work for this use-case.
2. If the 'current' bucket for a size class is full, the list of buckets is never traversed and instead a new bucket is allocated. Previously, traversing the bucket list could only find a non-full bucket in specific circumstances, and only because of a separate optimization that is no longer needed (before, after any resize/free, the affected bucket would be moved to the head of the bucket list to allow searchBucket to perform better on average). Now, the current_bucket for each size class only changes when either (1) the current bucket is emptied/freed, or (2) a new bucket is allocated (due to the current bucket being full or null). Because each bucket's alloc_cursor only moves forward (i.e. slots within a bucket are never re-used), we can therefore always know that any bucket besides the current_bucket will be full, so traversing the list in the hopes of finding an existing non-full bucket is entirely pointless.
3. Size + alignment information for small allocations has been moved into the Bucket data instead of keeping it in a separate HashMap. This offers an improvement over the HashMap since whenever we need to get/modify the length/alignment of an allocation it's extremely likely we will already have calculated any bucket-related information necessary to get the data.
The first change is the most relevant and accounts for most of the benefit here. Also note that the overall functionality of GeneralPurposeAllocator is unchanged.
In the degraded `arocc` case, these changes bring Debug performance from ~8 minutes to ~20 seconds.
Benchmark 1: test-master.bat
Time (mean ± σ): 481.263 s ± 5.440 s [User: 479.159 s, System: 1.937 s]
Range (min … max): 477.416 s … 485.109 s 2 runs
Benchmark 2: test-optim-treap.bat
Time (mean ± σ): 19.639 s ± 0.037 s [User: 18.183 s, System: 1.452 s]
Range (min … max): 19.613 s … 19.665 s 2 runs
Summary
'test-optim-treap.bat' ran
24.51 ± 0.28 times faster than 'test-master.bat'
Note: Much of the time taken on Windows in this particular case is related to gathering stack traces. With `.stack_trace_frames = 0` the runtime goes down to 6.7 seconds, which is a little more than 2.5x slower compared to when the c_allocator is used.
These changes may or mat not introduce a slight performance regression in the average case:
Here's the standard library tests on Windows in Debug mode:
Benchmark 1 (10 runs): std-tests-master.exe
measurement mean ± σ min … max outliers delta
wall_time 16.0s ± 30.8ms 15.9s … 16.1s 1 (10%) 0%
peak_rss 42.8MB ± 8.24KB 42.8MB … 42.8MB 0 ( 0%) 0%
Benchmark 2 (10 runs): std-tests-optim-treap.exe
measurement mean ± σ min … max outliers delta
wall_time 16.2s ± 37.6ms 16.1s … 16.3s 0 ( 0%) 💩+ 1.3% ± 0.2%
peak_rss 42.8MB ± 5.18KB 42.8MB … 42.8MB 0 ( 0%) + 0.1% ± 0.0%
And on Linux:
Benchmark 1: ./test-master
Time (mean ± σ): 16.091 s ± 0.088 s [User: 15.856 s, System: 0.453 s]
Range (min … max): 15.870 s … 16.166 s 10 runs
Benchmark 2: ./test-optim-treap
Time (mean ± σ): 16.028 s ± 0.325 s [User: 15.755 s, System: 0.492 s]
Range (min … max): 15.735 s … 16.709 s 10 runs
Summary
'./test-optim-treap' ran
1.00 ± 0.02 times faster than './test-master'