LC

Use jemalloc or tcmalloc as Drop-in Replacement and Measure

easy4/8

Implement Bump Allocator for Short-Lived Allocations Compress Large Data Structures by Packing Bit Fields

Language

Compiler

2.0s Limit 256MB

Implementation

Compare standard malloc with jemalloc/tcmalloc performance.

Requirements:

Create program with many small allocations
Use multiple threads to show contention
Benchmark with standard malloc
Show how to use jemalloc as LD_PRELOAD
Show how to use tcmalloc as LD_PRELOAD
Measure performance difference (2-5x speedup)
Demonstrate per-thread cache benefit
Print compilation and usage instructions
Show profiling commands for both allocators
Compare memory usage patterns

Why This Matters

jemalloc (Jason Evans, originally for FreeBSD) is what Firefox and Redis link against specifically to eliminate glibc ptmalloc's single global lock under multithreaded load, and tcmalloc is the allocator Google ships inside Chrome and much of its internal infrastructure for the same reason. Swapping allocators via LD_PRELOAD without touching a line of application code, and measuring the before/after, is a real technique performance engineers use as a first, cheap lever before attempting any code-level optimization.

Hints

0 / 3 revealed

Validation Suite

main.c

Workspace 1.0