Talk:Viewer Memory Manager

Suggestions

Intel's Threading Building Blocks

Intel's Threading Building Blocks has a scalable memory manager that works on Linux, OSX, and Windows. At this time, I haven't put it in action yet to see what details it gives. Dzonatas Sol 08:39, 15 August 2007 (PDT)

Hoard

The Hoard Memory Allocator is a high performance memory allocation library licensed under the GPL. I'm not an expert in these areas, but it seems to head in the same direction as SmartHeap. The author's website doesn't explicitly mention OS X support, but some Google digging and a visit to its Freshmeat page reveals that this library does indeed support the trio of OSes that Second Life needs.

I don't see any evidence that Hoard does run time memory profiling, however. Using Hoard might unify the codebase and bring some performance enhancements to the OS X and Linux clients, but might not move ahead toward the feature set outlined here. --Kel Hartunian 18:18, 25 June 2008 (PDT)

I took an extremely cursory look at this, mainly interested in licensing terms. It looks like in addition to GPL, there's proprietary licensing available for this, so it's feasible for Linden Lab to license this for use in the mainline viewer, though I can't speak to what those terms are. -- Rob Linden 19:05, 13 July 2008 (PDT)

This page details licensing Hoard, including contact information for a person to discuss it with. The website claims that Hoard is a "a drop-in replacement for malloc()" so (hopefully) implementing it would be straightforward and worth it in cost/benefit terms. They offer an example software license (doc) and its attendant terms and conditions (pdf) at that page also. -Kel Hartunian 16:24, 16 July 2008 (PDT)

Sure would've been nice of them to LGPL a bit of code like this though. :( -Kel Hartunian 11:55, 17 July 2008 (PDT)