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From: Stefan Bellon <sbellon@sbellon.de>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Finding out minimal allocation unit
Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2007 19:55:06 +0200
Organization: University of Stuttgart
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Date: 2007-04-05T19:55:06+02:00
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Markus E Leypold wrote:

> And I thought it would exactly be the extra padding the OP was
> interested in?

Yes, basically I'm interested in the padding which is inserted and
wasted and which could be used without resulting in a larger allocated
memory chunk.

So, instead of doing:

   type Cell1;

   type List is access all Cell1;

   type Cell1 is record
      Next : List;
      Item : Item_Type;
   end record;

We would like to do:

   type Cell2 is record
      Next  : List;
      Used  : Natural;
      Items : array (1 .. N) of Item_Type;
   end record;

Where N is chosen in a way that N is maximized without resulting in the
whole Cell to require the next larger allocation size.

Of course, there is a problem when Cell1'Size (or Cell1'Object_Size?)
is _exactly_ an allocation size as the Cell2 has the necessary Used
element which takes space and thus forces the next larger allocation
unit. But then, N is at least 2 which makes the whole list not worse
than a list of Cell1.

The whole List/Cell stuff is inside a generic and Item_Type is the type
the generic is instantiated with.

So, the question is, how to accurately find out the allocation size for
Cell1 and Cell2 respectively in order to calculate the best N.

In theory it should be possible to create a list of Cell2 which is no
worse in memory consumption than a list of Cell1, but at present we see
quite some memory penalty and figured out that this is because GNAT
(the compiler we use) allocates larger memory chunks than we calculated
using the provided attributes ('Size, 'Object_Size, 'Component'Size,
...).

The main two problems seem to be that we a) don't know the memory
allocation strategy and b) that GNAT's record/array layout seems to be
different than we assume.

Let's look at some data which is puzzling us:

   type Cell is record
      Item : Ada.Strings.Unbounded.Unbounded_String;
   end record;

   type Items is array (1 .. 1)
     of Ada.Strings.Unbounded.Unbounded_String;

Then, the following is the result of querying the mentioned attributes:

Cell'Size: 352
Cell'Object_Size: 352
Items'Component_Size: 192

So, when used in an array, an unbounded string only needs 24 bytes, and
when used in an record, it needs 44 bytes. Now, when adding another
unbounded string to a record and then building an array of that:

   type CellX is record
      Item1, Item2 : Ada.Strings.Unbounded.Unbounded_String;
   end record;

   type ItemsX is array (1 .. 1) of CellX;

Then the following is the result:

CellX'Size: 544
CellX'Object_Size: 544
ItemsX'Component_Size: 544

Where 544 are 68 bytes = 24 bytes + 44 bytes.

I am really not sure how to explain this ... any help is very welcome!

-- 
Stefan Bellon