Implicit malloc/free replacement on windows/MSVC

[David Rigby]

Hi,

I’m investigating replacing our application's existing memory allocator (tcmalloc) with jemalloc, mainly due to jemalloc’s “lowest possible address” policy which facilities some application-level reallocation of long-lived objects to reduce heap fragmentation.

The integration on Linux and OS X is working nicely, however I’ve come to Windows and I’ve hit a bit of an impasse in dealing with indirect uses of malloc (e.g. strdup()), and I wonder if anyone has any ideas.

First - what does work:

1) I can build jemalloc as a DLL and using a deffile (inspired by mozilla [1]) I can create malloc/calloc/realloc/free symbols pointing at their je_ prefix’d equivalents (inside jemalloc.dll) which my application will use when explicitly calling those functions - so far so good. 
However, if the allocation indirectly calls malloc (for example via strdup()) then strdup uses the malloc symbol inside the CRT, and as soon as free() is called I get a segfault (not withstanding I also have two heaps in use now).

2) Going down the statically-linked route [2], I can create a jemalloc_s.lib which has a null JE_PREFIX, and hence the application itself will again call jemalloc’s malloc/free functions. But again the strdup problem remains.

The only solutions I can find to this are either:

(A) runtime-patching the various CRT functions to jump to the custom allocators versions - as implemented by tcmalloc [3].
(B) building a custom version of the CRT with the memory allocation functions removed, and statically linking this into the application - as implemented by mozilla [4].

Does anyone know of a “third way” to solve this? 

If not, I think the tcmalloc runtime-patching is fractionally the lesser of the two evils - would the list (Jason?) consider accepting a patch which ported that functionality to jemalloc? It’s written in C++ which may be undesirable, but it’s Windows only at least…


Thanks,

DaveR

[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/master/mozglue/build/mozglue.def.in
[2]: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-perftools/Qc03EK-F5Xs
[3]: https://github.com/gperftools/gperftools/blob/master/src/windows/patch_functions.cc
[4]: http://benjamin.smedbergs.us/blog/2008-01-10/patching-the-windows-crt/