Optimizing C code for database query performance using custom memory management
Does anyone know how to I'm optimizing some code but I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about Currently developing a performance-sensitive application that interacts heavily with a C-based database engine... The goal is to optimize query execution time, which has proven challenging due to memory allocation overhead. Our current implementation uses standard `malloc` and `free`, but profiling shows that memory allocation is a significant bottleneck, especially under heavy load. I've explored using a memory pool to manage allocations more efficiently, but I'm uncertain about the best approach to implement it effectively in C. Here's a snippet of what I've tried: ```c #include <stdlib.h> #include <stdio.h> #define POOL_SIZE 1024 typedef struct { void *pool; size_t offset; } MemoryPool; MemoryPool* create_pool() { MemoryPool *mp = malloc(sizeof(MemoryPool)); mp->pool = malloc(POOL_SIZE); mp->offset = 0; return mp; } void* pool_alloc(MemoryPool *mp, size_t size) { if (mp->offset + size > POOL_SIZE) return NULL; void *ptr = (char*)mp->pool + mp->offset; mp->offset += size; return ptr; } void pool_free(MemoryPool *mp) { mp->offset = 0; // Reset the pool } void destroy_pool(MemoryPool *mp) { free(mp->pool); free(mp); } ``` Using this memory pool, I've replaced several calls to `malloc` within our query execution functions. However, performance gains have not been as significant as expected. I still notice delays when processing large result sets. Could there be other factors in the codebase affecting this? Would implementing a more sophisticated memory management strategy, such as object pooling, provide better results? I've also considered using alternatives like `jemalloc` or `tcmalloc` for their efficiency, but integrating them has its own learning curve. If anyone has insights on finer optimizations or best practices for managing memory in high-performance C applications, I'd greatly appreciate your guidance! For context: I'm using C on Linux. For reference, this is a production microservice. Am I approaching this the right way? The project is a application built with C. Hoping someone can shed some light on this. Any examples would be super helpful.