Jemalloc 5.3 Released With Many Speed & Space Optimizations

Last week marked the first update to the jemalloc memory allocation library since August of 2019. This malloc() implementation focused concurrency and memory fragmentation avoidance has seen more speed optimizations and other improvements in this new jemalloc 5.3 release.

Jemalloc 5.3 most notably has "many speed and space optimizations." The jemalloc 5.3 announcement by Facebook's Qi Wang explains, "This release contains many speed and space optimizations, from micro optimizations on common paths to rework of internal data structures and locking schemes, and many more too detailed to list below. Multiple percent of system level metric improvements were measured in tested production workloads. The release has gone through large-scale production testing."

Jemalloc 5.3 supports C++17's over-aligned allocation, high resolution timestamp support for profiling, new mallctl interfaces, optimizing the common cases for thread cache operations, optimizing internal data structures, optimized internal locking, and other changes.

Jemalloc 5.3 also continues enhancing OS and CPU portability with now improving CPU affinity support on BSDs, various ARC / MIPS64 / LoongArch improvements, continuous integration support for PPC64LE, official support for DeagonFlyBSD, and various other changes.

Downloads and more details on Jemalloc 5.3 via GitHub or the project site at jemalloc.net.