ACDC: Towards a Universal Mutator for Benchmarking Heap Management Systems

We present ACDC, an open-source benchmark that may be config-ured to emulate explicit single- and multi-threaded memory alloca-tion, sharing, access, and deallocation behavior to expose virtually any relevant allocator performance differences. ACDC mimics pe-riodic memory allocation and deallocation (AC) as well as persis-tent memory (DC). Memory may be allocated thread-locally and shared among multiple threads to study multicore scalability and even false sharing. Memory may be deallocated by threads other than the allocating threads to study blowup memory fragmentation. Memory may be accessed and deallocated sequentially in alloca-tion order or in tree-like traversals to expose allocator deficiencies in exploiting spatial locality. We demonstrate ACDC’s capabili-ties with seven state-of-the-art allocators for C/C++ in an empir-ical study which also reveals interesting performance differences between the allocators