Very clever use of virtual memory.
Unfortunately I would expect this technique not to scale well with increasing page size, and I sure hope that we will be slowly moving to >4k pages as years go by since the TLB is a very common bottleneck.
Unfortunately I would expect this technique not to scale well with increasing page size, and I sure hope that we will be slowly moving to >4k pages as years go by since the TLB is a very common bottleneck.
We didn't look at huge pages in the paper for the reason that today, if you care most about heap footprint you can always use 4K pages rather than 2M ones. (and lots of database-like applications, like Redis, explicitly suggest disabling huge pages)
> Mesh makes meshing both efficient and provably effective (with high probability) by combining it with two novel randomized algorithms. First, Mesh uses a space-efficient randomized allocation strategy that effectively scatters objects within each virtual page, making the above scenario provably exceedingly unlikely. Second, Mesh incorporates an efficient randomized algorithm that is guaranteed with high probability to quickly find candidate pages that are likely to mesh.
> Meshing is only possible when no objects on the pages occupy the same offsets. A key observation is that as fragmentation increases (that is, as there are more free objects),the likelihood of successfully finding pairs of pages that mesh also increases.