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Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2015 18:49:22 +0200
From: magnum <john.magnum@...hmail.com>
To: john-dev@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: calloc()/mmap() vs. fork()

On 2015-09-17 20:53, Solar Designer wrote:
> I've just tried changing our mem_calloc() to make it actually use
> calloc(), and using it for the hash tables and bitmaps in loader.c.

This was news to be, although git blame shows I should have been aware 
of it. I regard it a bug and have now committed such a change.

> The result is surprising: fork() became slow.  Like, it literally takes
> multiple seconds just to spawn the 7 child processes.  So e.g. if I
> press a key a few seconds after all 8 processes are finally cracking, I
> see them display very different timestamps (up to 10 seconds apart).
> Perhaps our partial and out-of-order filling of the hash tables and
> bitmaps results in page tables that are costly to fork().

Was this with that multi-thread patch in use?

> We might want to revisit this once we implement keeping the loaded
> hashes in a shared memory region.

After reverting that problematic patch, I tried using calloc() in loader 
with no problems (nor any clear benefit) but haven't committed that.

magnum

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