Dear Misc,
I'm currently putting together a new load balancer for my company's web
farm, using OBSD for CARP redundancy and stability. I've chosen Pound[0]
as it seems to be very simple and fast, and I like what I perceive to be
their somewhat OBSD-like philosophies of easily readable, easily
checkable, reliable code.
That's the intro, now the question: The Pound documentation recomends
that I should use PCRE and the Google PerfTools tcmalloc to increase
speed. I'm already having to compile OpenSSL for thread support, and
pcre is supplied as a package, but I'm wary of tcmalloc. It doesn't
appear to be available as a package or port, and it strikes me that a
memory allocator is a pretty fundamental thing to be mucking around
with. The developers spent some time getting OpenBSD's core libraries
just so, and unless I've got a good reason I'm inclined to trust them.
However, 50ns versus 300ns for a malloc/free[1] seems like it could be a
pretty good reason, but our current load balancer seems to be doing ok
for now without it.
I dunno. Am I being overly paranoid, or should I stick with nice
dependable old-fashioned malloc?
Looking for Clue...
Dave
[0] http://www.apsis.ch/pound/
[1] http://goog-perftools.sourceforge.net/doc/tcmalloc.html
