The current `prevector` size of 28 bytes (chosen to fill the `sizeof(CScript)` aligned size) was introduced in 2015 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/6914) before SegWit and TapRoot.
However, the increasingly common `P2WSH` and `P2TR` scripts are both 34 bytes, and are forced to use heap (re)allocation rather than efficient inline storage.
The core trade-off of this change is to eliminate heap allocations for common 34-36 byte scripts at the cost of increasing the base memory footprint of all `CScript` objects by 8 bytes (while still respecting peak memory usage defined by `-dbcache`).
Increasing the `prevector` size allows these scripts to be stored inline, avoiding extra heap allocations, reducing potential memory fragmentation, and improving performance during cache flushes. Massif analysis confirms a lower stable memory usage after flushing, suggesting the elimination of heap allocations outweighs the larger base size for common workloads.
Due to memory alignment, increasing the `prevector` size to 36 bytes doesn't change the overall `sizeof(CScript)` compared to an increase to 34 bytes, allowing us to include `P2PK` scripts as well at no additional memory cost.
Performance benchmarks for AssumeUTXO load and flush show:
* Small dbcache (450MB): ~1-3% performance improvement (despite more frequent flushes)
* Large dbcache (4500MB): ~6-8% performance improvement due to fewer heap allocations (and basically the number of flushes)
* Very large dbcache (4500MB): ~5-6% performance improvement due to fewer heap allocations (and memory limit not being reached, so there's no memory penalty)
Full IBD and reindex-chainstate with larger `dbcache` values also show an overall ~3-4% speedup.
Co-authored-by: Ava Chow <github@achow101.com>
Co-authored-by: Andrew Toth <andrewstoth@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: maflcko <6399679+maflcko@users.noreply.github.com>
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