The memory allocator plays a key role in the performance of applications, but none of the existing profilers can pinpoint performance slowdowns caused by a memory allocator. Consequently, programmers may spend time improving application code incorrectly or unnecessarily, achieving low or no performance improvement. This paper designs the first profiler—MemPerf—to identify allocator-induced performance slowdowns without comparing against another allocator. Based on the key observation that an allocator may impact the whole life-cycle of heap objects, including the accesses (or uses) of these objects, MemPerf proposes a life-cycle based detection to identify slowdowns caused by slow memory management operations and slow accesses separately. For the prior one, MemPerf proposes a thread-aware and type-aware performance modeling to identify slow management operations. For slow memory accesses, MemPerf utilizes a top-down approach to identify all possible reasons for slow memory accesses introduced by the allocator, mainly due to cache and TLB misses, and further proposes a unified method to identify them correctly and efficiently. Based on our extensive evaluation, MemPerf reports 98% medium and large allocator-reduced slowdowns (larger than 5%) correctly without reporting any false positives. MemPerf also pinpoints multiple known and unknown design issues in widely-used allocators.

@article{paperbot1875,
  title = {MemPerf: Profiling Allocator-Induced Performance Slowdowns},
  author = {Jin Zhou and Sam Silvestro and Steven (Jiaxun) Tang and Hanmei Yang and Hongyu Liu and Guangming Zeng and Bo Wu and Cong Liu and Tongping Liu},
  journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages},
  volume = {7},
  number = {OOPSLA2},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.1145/3622848}
}