The tag pool is a shared global resource that is infrequently
modified. However, it can occasionally be modified by several
threads, especially by the metadata_pipe for streaming metadata
(both reading/writing).
The bulk tag_item pool is NOT locked as currently only the
update thread uses it.
The new source tag_pool.c manages a pool of reference counted tag_item
objects. This is used to merge tag items of the same type and value,
saving lots of memory. Formerly, only the value itself was pooled,
wasting memory for all the pointers and tag_item structs.
The following results were measured with massif. Started MPD on
amd64, typed "mpc", no song being played. My music database contains
35k tagged songs. The results are what massif reports as "peak".
0.13.2: total 14,131,392; useful 11,408,972; extra 2,722,420
eric: total 18,370,696; useful 15,648,182; extra 2,722,514
mk f34f694: total 15,833,952; useful 13,111,470; extra 2,722,482
mk now: total 12,837,632; useful 10,626,383; extra 2,211,249
This patch set saves 20% memory, and does a good job in reducing heap
fragmentation.
