Tick Tock, malloc Needs a Clock
Jason Evans · 2015
The jemalloc memory allocator is well known for low fragmentation and high concurrency, yet those two strengths sabotage each other. Eager free memory coalescence facilitates fragmentation avoidance, but concurrency scalability benefits from large and loosely coupled caches. Historically jemalloc has cached conservatively, with especially deleterious effects during rapid, large memory usage fluctuations.