Call for testing: Concurrent malloc(3) calls (to speed up firefox)
by from OpenBSD Journal on (#11M9C)
Mark Kettenis (kettenis@) posted to tech@ asking Firefox users and others to test a patch that changes the threadsafe malloc(3) strategy from spinlocks to mutexes. Mark writes,
Firefox makes a lot of concurrent malloc(3) calls. The locking tomake malloc(3) thread-safe is a bit...suboptimal. This diff makesthings better by using a mutex instead of spinlock. If you're runningFirefox you want to try it; it makes video watchable on some machines.If you're not running Firefox you want to try it; to make sure itdoesn't break things.
Testing this requires a recent -current (5.9-beta) system; grab the latest source, apply the patch, rebuild and report back any effects, good or bad.