Impact of memory allocators on MySQL performance

MySQL server intensively uses dynamic memory allocation so a good choice of memory allocator is quite important for the proper utilization of CPU/RAM resources. Efficient memory allocator should help to improve scalability, increase throughput and keep memory footprint under the control. In this post I’m going to check impact of several memory allocators on the performance/scalability of MySQL server in the read-only workloads.

For my testing i chose following allocators: lockless, jemalloc-2.2.5, jemalloc-3.0, tcmalloc(gperftools-2.0), glibc-2.12.1(new malloc)(CentOS 6.2), glibc-2.13(old malloc), glibc-2.13(new malloc), glibc-2.15(new malloc).