[llvm-dev] Reducing DWARF emitter memory consumption

[Peter Collingbourne via llvm-dev]

On Fri, Feb 05, 2016 at 04:58:45PM -0800, Mehdi Amini wrote:
> 
> > On Feb 5, 2016, at 3:17 PM, Peter Collingbourne via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> > 
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > We have profiled [1] the memory usage in LLVM when LTO'ing Chromium, and
> > we've found that one of the top consumers of memory is the DWARF emitter in
> > lib/CodeGen/AsmPrinter/Dwarf*.
> 
> I'm staring at the profile attached to the post #15 on the link you posted, can you confirm that the Dwarf emitter accounts for 6.7%+15.6%=22.3% of the the total allocated memory?
> If I understand correctly the numbers, this does not tell anything about how much the Dwarf emitter accounts on the *peak memory* usage (could be more, could be nothing...).

I think these nodes represent allocations from the DWARF emitter:

DwarfDebug::DwarfDebug 9.5%
DwarfDebug::endFunction 15.6%
DIEValueList::addValue 9.1%
total 34.2%

I believe they are totals, but my reading of the code is that the DWARF
emitter does not deallocate its memory until the end of code generation,
so total ~= peak in this case.

I am not surprised by these figures -- see e.g. DIEValueList::Node which in
the worst case can use up to 24 bytes on a 1-byte DWARF attribute record.

Ivan was the person who collected the numbers, he may be able to comment more.

Thanks,
-- 
Peter