MALLOC_ARENA_MAX environment variable in Symantec Protection Engine 7.8 on Linux operating system

Products

• Protection Engine for Cloud Services
• Protection Engine for NAS

Issue/Introduction

 

Resolution

Glibc 2.10 and later has introduced MALLOC_ARENA_MAX environment variable. This is an enhanced dynamic memory allocation behavior that enables higher scalability across many sockets and cores. This is achieved by assigning threads their own memory pools and by avoiding locking in some situations. The amount of additional memory used for the memory pools (if any) can be controlled using the environment variables MALLOC_ARENA_MAX.

As Glibc 2.10 and later introduced MALLOC_ARENA_MAX environment variable, every thread of Symantec Protection Engine process would have its own memory pool associated with it. This behavior of Symantec Protection Engine would lead to an increased memory consumption. To overcome the amount of additional memory used for these memory pools, Symantec Protection Engine 7.8 during startup sets MALLOC_ARENA_MAX environment variable equal to the number of CPU cores.