Subj : Heap contention/BC5.02 crt
To   : borland.public.cpp.borlandcpp
From : Björn Lantz
Date : Thu Nov 18 2004 11:58 am

Hi,

I have identified a performance issue for my application that spawns of lot
of threads that make tons of malloc/free. It runs well on single-processor
systems, but it runs *slower* the more processors I run it on. I link with
the MT libraries. I checked the runtime libraries and found s a lock
(EnterCriticalSection/LeaveCriticalSection) for the heap functions that seem
to be causing this due to that the the remaining timeslice for a thread is
given away as soon as a lock is encountered. Then I think that the context
switching overhead is the problem.

After searching the net i found a commercial product that, according to the
description, could help.

My question is if there is a free alternative, or maybe some addition to the
BC5.02 runtime libs that has a SMP-optimized heap manager or maybe a way to
set local heaps per thread within a process?

My very best,
/Björn Lantz

.