I've been using jemalloc for over 10 years and don't really see a need for it to be updated. It always holds up in benchmarks against any new flavor of the month malloc that comes out.
Last time I checked mimalloc which was admittedly a while ago, probably 5 years, it was noticebly worse and I saw a lot of people on their github issues agreeing with me so I just never looked at it again.
Mimalloc v3 has just come out (about a month ago) and is a significant improvement over both v2 and v1 (what you likely last tested)
Benchmarks age fast. Treating a ten-year-old allocator as done just because it still wins old tests is tempting fate, since distros, glibc, kernel VM behavior, and high-core alloc patterns keep moving and the failures usually show up as weird regressions in production, not as a clean loss on someone's benchmark chart.
It still beat mimalloc when I checked 4-5 years ago.
You really need to benchmark your workloads, ideally with the "big 3" (jemalloc, tcmalloc, mimalloc). They all have their strengths and weaknesses.
Jemalloc can usually keep the smallest memory footprint, followed by tcmalloc.
Mimalloc can really speed things up sometimes.
As usually, YMMV.
I've benchmarked them every few years, they never seem to differ by more than a few percent, and jemalloc seems to fragment and leak the least for processes running for months.
Mimalloc made the claim that they were the fastest/best when they released and that didn't hold up to real world testing, so I am not inclined to trust it now.
> Mimalloc made the claim that they were the fastest/best when they released and that didn't hold up to real world testing
That’s… ahistorical, at least so far as I remember. It wasn’t marketed as either of those; it was marketed as small/simple/consistent with an opt-in high-severity mode, and then its performance bore out as a result of the first set of target features/design goals. It was mainly pushed as easy to adopt, easy to use, easy to statically link, etc.
> It was mainly pushed as easy to adopt, easy to use, easy to statically link, etc.
That is true of basically every single malloc replacement out there, that is not a uniquely defining feature.
Look up the numbers in other comments above. When it comes to performance, the Google's tcmalloc is unconquered.