Everyone Back in the Pool!
Today was spent working a lot on the efficiency of the ticker plants - most notably on removing the excessive use of malloc() and free() or new and delete and replacing it with some pooled containers for the processing of the UDP datagrams and the payloads of the ZeroMQ messages. I'm not really sure how inefficient linux is for dealing with small allocations, say less than 1kB, but it can't be good to have 20,000/sec flipping through the system.
It's really pretty simple - given the fact that I'm dealing with reasonably small container sizes. I just needed to have an STL list of some kind - a simple spinlock to protect it, and then a simple alloc() method to get one from the pool, or create one if the pool is empty, and recycle() to put it back in the pool, if there's room, or delete it if not. Not rocket science.
In fact, I made a special StringPool just for the ZeroMQ messages as they are being held in simple STL std::string objects. The bonus of all this is that I don't ahve to have a "receive buffer" and then copy the data from the receive buffer into the container for pushing onto the stack. I can allocate one from the pool, have the boost ASIO put the data in the container, and then simply transfer the pointer into the stack.
Far simple. Very sweet, in fact.
Once I had it done, it has to work better even if it doesn't spec out to be any faster - the switches to the system for malloc() and free() have to be making a positive difference. Good enough.