Brug: An Adaptive Memory (Re-)Allocator

Although memory allocation is well-studied, it is far from being a solved problem. There exist many allocators, each offering varied performance depending on the underlying workload. With workloads becoming ever more complex, practitioners need to take difficult decisions for the performance tuning of memory allocation: which allocators to choose and how to tweak their knobs are legitimate questions.In this article, we take a deep look at memory allocators and propose Brug, an adaptive memory allocator that builds upon the strengths of all existing allocators and discards their weaknesses. Brug can help programmers choose the suitable allocator for their applications or even for individual data structures and functions within applications, allowing for different allocators within the same program. Brug also offers an auto-tuner to minimize developer decision-making.Brug comes in two flavors: (1) Rust-based library that can be added to modern Rust code bases, helping in allocation and re-allocation performance and diagnosis. (2) C-based library that can be dynamically linked at runtime for existing legacy programs to optimize their performance. Brug was deployed with industry standard-grade frameworks, such as Apache Arrow, Wasmtime WebAssembly virtual machine, and Redis. Our experiments show that Brug can improve performance in all types of applications and help developers toward taking otherwise difficult decisions. Brug consistently improves application execution time.