Currently we always zero objects when we allocate them. We used to
have an optimization that would not zero objects that had not been
allocated since the whole span was last zeroed (either by getting it
from the system or by getting it from the heap, which does a bulk
zero), but this depended on the sweeper clobbering the first two words
of each object. Hence, we lost this optimization when the bitmap
sweeper went away.
Re-introduce this optimization using a different mechanism. Each span
already keeps a flag indicating that it just came from the OS or was
just bulk zeroed by the mheap. We can simply use this flag to know
when we don't need to zero an object. This is slightly less efficient
than the old optimization: if a span gets allocated and partially
used, then GC happens and the span gets returned to the mcentral, then
the span gets re-acquired, the old optimization knew that it only had
to re-zero the objects that had been reclaimed, whereas this
optimization will re-zero everything. However, in this case, you're
already paying for the garbage collection, and you've only wasted one
zeroing of the span, so in practice there seems to be little
difference. (If we did want to revive the full optimization, each span
could keep track of a frontier beyond which all free slots are zeroed.
I prototyped this and it didn't obvious do any better than the much
simpler approach in this commit.)
This significantly improves BinaryTree17, which is allocation-heavy
(and runs first, so most pages are already zeroed), and slightly
improves everything else.
name old time/op new time/op delta
XBenchGarbage-12 2.15ms ± 1% 2.14ms ± 1% -0.80% (p=0.000 n=17+17)