A Study in Malloc: A Case of Excessive Minor Faults

GNU libc's default setting for malloc can cause a significant performance penalty for applications that use it extensively, such as Compaq's high performance extended math library, CXML. The default malloc tuning can cause a significant number of minor page faults, and result in application performance of only half of the true potential. This paper describes how to remove the performance penalty using environmental variables and the method used to discover the cause of the malloc performance penalty.