WebKit Apocrypha

After I benchmarked JavaScriptCore with our new participant called DLmalloc, it has been suggested to test it with QtLauncher also. I compiled DLmalloc in thread-safe mode (USE_LOCKS=1), so it became capable to serve WebCore's memory requests. Perhaps, another solution could have been to turn off every use of threads in QtLauncher/WebCore, but I think this would be a lucky approach...

There are a lot of custom allocators in the world, so let's try another promising one, called DLmalloc. It was made by Doug Lea. I've put DLmalloc into JavaScriptCore with the help of the custom allocation framework. I tested DLmalloc only in JavaScriptCore, because it didn't work well with QtWebKit's multi-threaded features. The measurements have been made with QtWebKit, running on x86 Debian-Lenny.

 

Since, two of our tested allocators - TCmalloc, JEmalloc - benefit in multi-threaded environment, I did some benchmark which uses threading effectively. I run 2 instances of each popular benchmarks simultaneously with the help of JavaScript workers. I benchmarked on Linux-Qt port of WebKit and used official r54475 revision. All measurements were running in QtLauncher and did minimal painting only.

JEmalloc is a highly scalable memory allocator made by Jason Evans. This is the default allocator of the FreeBSD operating system and Firefox's Linux/Windows versions, but how does it perform in WebKit?