BytesMut's BufMut impl is much slower than Vec's about bytes HOT 3 CLOSED

Could branching between four different possible representations be a potential handicap as well?
I remember the times when small size optimization for Vec/String was discussed; the conclusion from people who tried to do this and measured the performance impact on rustc was that the added branching everywhere was just not worth it with the allocator that was in use (jemalloc was the default back then). I realise that the atomic ordering guarantees may be more costly, so a non-shared representation variant may still be worth it; not being much involved in this project's history, I can only assume that the other representations have shown performance improvement in realistic use cases.

I think a more promising direction for optimization would be to cut down on mutating APIs to optimize the primary use case for bytes, which is basically covered by the API of Buf/BufMut, .split_to(n).freeze(), and BytesMut::reserve: repetitions of pulling data incrementally into a BytesMut in a single task and handing off complete chunks in Bytes for potentially shared processing that does not tend to modify the data in place. I believe instilling some usage discipline can significantly reduce overhead on the hot paths.

If extension API on Bytes and segmentation of BytesMut is removed, the internal representation of BytesMut could just own a Shared instance referenced by immutable Bytes views (those which are in the ARC form) and never need to touch the reference count until it's dropped. Bytes would not need the capacity member so the struct would be 3/4 the size. It would still be possible to convert Bytes into BytesMut with no copying in case the Bytes' reference to the buffer is unique.

I can put these reformist ideas in more detail in an RFC-like issue if there is interest in this direction from the development team.

from bytes.

@mzabaluev Sure, more details would be needed to consider the change:

• List of APIs added / removed.
• Changes to internals.
• Performance characteristic differences for common usage patterns of Bytes / BytesMut.

from bytes.

I've done my homework in #268.

from bytes.