# On the Impact of Memory Allocation on High-Performance Query Processing

## TL;DR

This paper investigates how different memory allocators affect the performance of high-performance query engines, revealing that choosing the right allocator can significantly improve query processing efficiency and scalability.

## Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive experimental analysis of memory allocators' impact on high-performance query engines, comparing five state-of-the-art allocators within a DBMS.

## Key findings

- Performance of TPC-DS increased by 2.7x with optimal allocator
- Memory allocators influence scalability and memory efficiency
- Different allocators have distinct strengths and weaknesses

## Abstract

Somewhat surprisingly, the behavior of analytical query engines is crucially affected by the dynamic memory allocator used. Memory allocators highly influence performance, scalability, memory efficiency and memory fairness to other processes. In this work, we provide the first comprehensive experimental analysis on the impact of memory allocation for high-performance query engines. We test five state-of-the-art dynamic memory allocators and discuss their strengths and weaknesses within our DBMS. The right allocator can increase the performance of TPC-DS (SF 100) by 2.7x on a 4-socket Intel Xeon server.