Kamailio - TLSF – High Performance Memory Manager

Kamailio v4.3.0, Camille Oudout from Orange/Libon, France, pushed a new memory manager (named tlsf) focused on high performances on handling memory operations.

It is well known that Kamailio (from its very beginning as SER project back in 2001) has its own memory manager. That simplifies especially the handling of shared memory on different oeprating systems. There were two available, that can be enabled at compile time, so  called:

• f_malloc (aka fast malloc) – the one mostly used as default for stable releases
• q_malloc (aka quick malloc) – the one more suitable for memory operations troubleshooting

While these two memory managers were designed to be fast for multi-process applications such as Kamailio (e.g., avoid thread locking for private memory) as well as dealing with the patterns of routing SIP traffic, few special cases could result in slowing down — one of this is when needing to free a lot of allocated chucks of same size.

Worth to mention that system memory manager could be (and can still be) enabled to be used for private memory needs. Some other attempts to add new memory managers were not yet completed, therefore not being ready for use (e.g., the Doug Lea allocator or Lock Less allocator — you can check the source code tree, inside mem/ folder, for more details).

Camille implemented the Two Level Segregated Fit (TLSF) memory allocator, know to be O(1) for both malloc() and free() operations (no worse case behavior). It has a 4 byte block overhead, but hardware memory it cheap these days. You can read more about it at:

• http://tlsf.baisoku.org

It is not enabled by default, being rather young code now, but it is a good candidate to become in the near future. To enable it, you have to install Kamailio from sources and compile using:

make MEMDBG=1 MEMMNG=2 cfg
make all
make install

It will enable the debugging mechanism as well, that can be disabled by using MEMDBG=0.

If you start using it, do provide us feedback about how it performs, because it helps to assert its relevance and stability. Also, do not hesitate to start a discussion if you have questions or suggestions via the sr-dev mailing list.

Have a great summer!