The JIT has a minimum allocation granularity of 1 page, with code and data on separate pages. Reducing this minimum would mean having pages of memory shared between executors, which is much harder to manage (and isn't thread-safe).
So the minimum amount of memory owned by an executor is 2 pages. This equals 8KB of memory on most platforms (the notable exception being newer Macs which have 16KB pages, and thus a whopping 32KB minimum allocation per trace). And all of that memory is paged in, since there's at least some memory being used on every page.
We should tune the trace collection machinery to find a sensible minimum trace length for tier two. We might also consider compiling fewer traces.
A separate, but hairier, issue is what to do about the array of cold exit executors. We have 512 of them, and they're one instruction each, adding up to 4MB of mostly empty memory (16MB on macOS). For reference, if optimally packed (i.e. compiled as a single trace of length 512), they would take up about 200KB.
@mdboom has been working on measuring the memory overhead of tier two on our benchmark suite. Early results show that:
(Keep in mind that most of the benchmarks have a tiny memory footprint to begin with, so moderate increases can manifest as large percentages.)
CC: @gvanrossum, @markshannon
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