[OpenSER-Devel] RFC: memory management in database modules

[Henning Westerholt]

On Thursday 07 February 2008, Dan Pascu wrote:
> > Well ....do not take me as a performance maniac :D...As I said, it is
> > not about performance but about functionality - memory fragmentation is
> > something serious and we should try to avoid it as much as possible.
>
> As a side note to the discussed issue, I don't think it is realistic to
> assume that memory fragmentation will not occur by just avoiding some DB
> memory allocations that vary in size too much. Given the varying size of
> SIP requests, over time, if the proxy is online for a long time and
> servicing many requests per second, memory fragmentation will occur
> sooner or later, unless the memory allocator is smart and works around
> it, or if it has a defragmentor that is run when memory gets too
> fragmented.

It would be interesting to run OpenSER on a recent kernel with a recent glibc 
and sees how the performance figures of the standard malloc compares now 
against the internal f_malloc. The memory allocator in the kernel was 
reworked quite a few times, and some work have been done in the active 
defragmentation area (but i'm not sure if this have been merged yet).

Cheers,

Henning