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I am the one who originally added this sleep call to WebKit, when we first imported TCMalloc to use as our custom allocator. It was indeed there for a reason, but that reason is not applicable to WebKit's allocation patterns. TCMalloc was designed for a server workload, over time we have adapted it more to the unique needs of a browser engine. This change may help other operations, but probably not as much as the GC benchmark in question.

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The person making this change seems to have not read the original comment either. It sounds like your change made the previous iteration of that code faster.

This reminds me why I hate comments. They tell you what someone once thought the code did. They don't actually tell you what the code does. You should always trust actual code and actual measurements above comments.

The original author of this comment (not me, I just imported the code) believed that it improved performance on a given server-side workload.

The person who removed the sleep, Geoff Garen (a colleague and a friend), is a good programmer. I am confident that he read the comment before deleting it. However, his actual performance measurement trumps the comment.

BTW, here is Geoff's snarky response on reading the posts here that mention the comment above the sleep() call: <http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3qqgwz/>. I agree with him.

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