Monthly Archives: October 2018

glibc 2.25 bug : strstr() runs 10 times slower than on 2.24

Linux is used on 54.9% of the world websites : almost every application running on a linux machine uses the glibc which provides the core libraries to access almost every feature of a linux system. The Mighty Glibc started back in 1988 and is a wonderful and glorious project.
As far as the string functions are concerned the sse / avx optimized versions of these functions (strlen, strcpy, strstr, strcmp and more) are up to 10 times faster than their corresponding standard c implementations (which for example you might find in the libmusl) when run on a sse/avx capable cpu.

We rely a lot on glibc string functions and that’s why we found that glibc 2.25 introduced some optimization on the AVX capable processors and this disabled sse* optimizations for methods that don’t have a avx2 optimized implementation (strstr, strcat, and I’m afraid parts of the math functions). For further details go here.
The bug affects ubuntu 18, debian 10, fedora 26 to 28.
A fix will come for sure, hopefully in glibc 2.29.

Update on November 3, 2020 : This bug was fixed in the package glibc – 2.27-3ubuntu1.3

Measuring memory footprint of a linux/macosx application

 

If you’re selling an API or an application which is deployed on production systems, one of the questions your customers might ask you is what is the memory footprint of your API/application in order for them to account for an increase of memory requirements due to using your product. After some research I think that the best tool for measuring and debugging any increases/decrease of your mem footprint is valgrind –tool=massif together with ms_print reporting tools.

Massif is a Heap memory profiler and will measure how much/when you allocate heap memory in your code and show the involved code. Run :

valgrind --tool=massif

this will execute the code and generate a massif.out.<pid> file that you may visualize with

ms_print massif.out.<pid>

Take a ride, the output is absolutely useful and you will have an histogram of how much memory is used at every sampling moment.