Gavriel State gav@transgaming.com writes:
We ended up creating a new subheap every time one of these larger blocks came along. The new space from the subheap then went to the top of the freelist, so all the small allocations then filled it up until the next large block allocation. IE: We never got a chance to reuse freed blocks in older subheaps - at least not very well.
That's why we have multiple free lists. The code is using the Win95 values now, but there is no reason we couldn't add a few larger values in the HEAP_freeListSizes array, instead of creating a new mechanism.
Despite the workaround, we're still not too pleased with the current heap allocator. It's quite slow, and still not as efficient as it could be. It would probably be worth the effort to integrate a new allocator - anyone know if there's a high-quality Wine-license- compatible allocator out there?
A new allocator would definitely be a good thing. This one was done the way it is in order to use a compatible memory layout, but it turns out this is not necessary so we could scrap it.