Diff mt_allocator

[Loren James Rittle]

> here's the diff that allocates chunks of memory directly to threads 
> according to rfc.
> I have tested it quite a bit (including recompiling a 10k line MT 
> application and running that) but I appriciate all reviewing and testing 
> - it's been a long day =)

Stefan,

Interesting patches (please consider using '-c' in the future; and
please avoid WS changes).  Please consider writing the changelog entry
(since we'd rather use your words than mine).  Logically, I see no
downside to these patches but haven't tested them beyond...

> Here's the before numbers (on the dual 2.4 Ghz machine):
> real    0m18.026s
> user    0m12.620s
> sys     0m13.480s

Any idea why you saw so much sys time here?  Is that the global
contention factor that you have removed with the second patch?

> And this is after this diff:
> real    0m4.123s
> user    0m13.740s
> sys     0m1.460s

Using the included test case, I see the following on a single PII/350
running i386-*-freebsd4.9:

-r1.9 (-O2 -g -pthread):

    30r    27.0u     1.8s       ./a.out

w/ first patch only (to address single-threaded speedup):

    30r    27.2u     1.7s       ./a.out

w/ both patches:

    15r    14.4u     1.2s       ./a.out

Nice to see my ~5 year old HW can keep up... (ignore wall time please ;-)

Regards,
Loren