How does jemalloc work? What are the benefits?

Question

Firefox 3 came with a new allocator: jemalloc.

I have heard at several places that this new allocator is better. The top Google results don\'t gave any

Answer 1

Aerospike implemented jemalloc back in a private branch in 2013. In 2014, it was incorporated into Aerospike 3.3. Psi Mankoski just wrote about Aerospike's implementation, plus when and how to effectively use jemalloc, for High Scalability.

jemalloc really helped Aerospike take advantage of modern multithreaded, multi-CPU, multi-core computer architectures. There are also some very important debugging capabilities built in to jemalloc to manage arenas. The debugging allowed Psi to be able to tell, for instance, what was a true memory leak, versus what was the result of memory fragmentation. Psi also discusses how thread cache and per-thread allocation provided an overall performance (speed) improvement.