On the Impact of Dynamic Memory Management on Software Transactional Memory Performance
Alexandro Baldassin, Edson Borin, Guido Costa Souza De Araujo · 2014
Although dynamic memory management accounts for a significant part of the execution time on many modern software systems, its impact on the performance of transactional memory systems has been mostly overlooked. In order to shed some light into this subject, this paper reports our first attempt at evaluating the effects of memory allocators on the performance of transactional applications. In general, our results indicate a strong influence of the allocators on the overall performance. In particular, we observed differences ranging from 4% to 171% in the STAMP applications. Our results point to the importance of reporting the allocator utilized in the performance evaluation of transactional memory systems, as the conclusions might change from one allocator to another.