Every lsa-allocated object is prefixed by a header that contains information
needed to free or migrate it. This includes its size (for freeing) and
an 8-byte migrator (for migrating). Together with some flags, the overhead
is 14 bytes (16 bytes if the default alignment is used).
This patch reduces the header size to 1 byte (8 bytes if the default alignment
is used). It uses the following techniques:
- ULEB128-like encoding (actually more like ULEB64) so a live object's header
can typically be stored using 1 byte
- indirection, so that migrators can be encoded in a small index pointing
to a migrator table, rather than using an 8-byte pointer; this exploits
the fact that only a small number of types are stored in LSA
- moving the responsibility for determining an object's size to its
migrator, rather than storing it in the header; this exploits the fact
that the migrator stores type information, and object size is in fact
information about the type
The patch improves the results of memory_footprint_test as following:
Before:
- in cache: 976
- in memtable: 947
After:
mutation footprint:
- in cache: 880
- in memtable: 858
A reduction of about 10%. Further reductions are possible by reducing the
alignment of lsa objects.
logalloc_test was adjusted to free more objects, since with the lower
footprint, rounding errors (to full segments) are different and caused
false errors to be detected.
Missing: adjustments to scylla-gdb.py; will be done after we agree on the
new descriptor's format.
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