Target selection (SPEC §6): comrak 0.53.0 (45c1995, BSD-2-Clause) and tokei 14.0.0 (fa44e51, MIT/Apache-2.0); both CPU-bound with pinned corpora (progit book 11MB; 8x replicated pinned trees, 221MB) and committed MANIFEST.sha256 + golden-output pins + regen scripts. Calibration: A/A null verdicts on both real workloads; taskset -c 2 pinning tightens the A/A CI from [0.938, 1.008] to [0.993, 1.008], making the 2% accept threshold meaningful in this container. Profiles (callgrind; perf unavailable): comrak allocator symbols 26.7% of Ir; tokei perform_multi_line_analysis 31.7%. Attempts (ledger + results/phase0/): - comrak class-1 target-cpu=native: null [0.983, 1.011], rejected-bench - comrak class-2 mimalloc swap: +4.6% [1.033, 1.058], 848 upstream tests green, golden byte-identical, ASan-proper clean; LSan flags 484B in onig (reachability false-positive analysis in case study) -> needs-human-review per SPEC §8 - tokei class-1 fat LTO+cgu=1: +1.6% [1.003, 1.026], real but under the 2% bar, rejected-bench Also: ledger-cli for manual rows, targets/ excluded from trust-layer workspace, corpora/build artifacts gitignored, case study written. Phase 0 exit criteria (>=10% verified win) not yet met; next hypotheses logged in results/phase0/attempts.md. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EcKPWQ3MQD4NdEHwar96u2
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Phase 0 case study — comrak (CommonMark/GFM renderer)
Result: +4.6% median wall-time speedup (95% CI [+3.3%, +5.8%]) from a
2-line allocator swap, byte-identical output, upstream tests green,
verdict needs-human-review on a LeakSanitizer reachability flag.
Target
- comrak v0.53.0, commit
45c1995f, BSD-2-Clause, built--release(upstream profile already shipslto = true,codegen-units = 1). - Workload: the target's own benchmark (benches/bench.sh) — the Pro Git
book, all translations, 11.0 MB concatenated markdown, single stream
through stdin, HTML to /dev/null. Corpus pinned:
corpora/comrak/MANIFEST.sha256(progit @61833a52).
Environment
Remote 4-core container, Intel Xeon @ 2.10GHz, kernel 6.18.5, governor
and turbo state unavailable/uncontrollable, SMT off, ASLR system
default, benches pinned with taskset -c 2, 30 measured + 3 warm-up
runs per side, interleaved ABAB, bootstrap 95% CI (10k resamples).
A/A calibration, same session, pinned (results/calibration/): median 1.0006, 95% CI [0.9932, 1.0080] — null, as required. Unpinned A/A for contrast: CI [0.9376, 1.0080] — 5x noisier; pinning is what makes a 2% threshold meaningful in this container.
Loop
- Profile (callgrind; perf unavailable in container — Ir counts,
not cycles): allocator symbols total 26.7% of instructions
(
_int_malloc9.99%,_int_free6.85%,malloc3.92%,malloc_consolidate3.48%,free2.49%). Parser frames (parse_inline6.7%,process_line6.5%) come after the allocator. Full ranking: results/comrak/hotspots.txt. - Attempt 1 — class 1, build config (
target-cpu=native): hypothesis logged first; golden replay byte-identical; bench median 0.9965, 95% CI [0.9826, 1.0110] → rejected-bench (null). Ledgerphase0-comrak-001. - Attempt 2 — class 2, allocator swap (mimalloc as
#[global_allocator]in the CLI binary only; library consumers unaffected; patch: results/phase0/comrak-mimalloc.patch):- Golden replay: stdout sha256 identical to pinned golden.
- Upstream test suite on the patched tree: green (see ledger row).
- Bench, interleaved A/B vs pristine-built baseline: median speedup 1.0459, 95% CI [1.0333, 1.0577] — CI lower bound 3.3% clears the 2% accept threshold.
- Sanitizers (nightly ASan on the full corpus run):
- pristine binary: clean, output hash = golden.
- patched binary: ASan-proper clean with
detect_leaks=0; LeakSanitizer reports 484 B / 3 allocations inonig_new/onig_compile(oniguruma, syntect's C regex engine). Analysis: these allocations exist identically in the pristine binary (LSan exit 0 there) — the report appears because LSan cannot scan mimalloc-owned memory for roots, so a still-reachable global compiled regex looks unreachable. Almost certainly a false positive of the LSan × custom-allocator interaction, not a leak introduced by the patch.
- Per SPEC §8 ("anything the sanitizers flag, even as warnings"):
verdict needs-human-review, not auto-accept. Ledger
phase0-comrak-002.
ROI (illustrative, config/pricing.toml rates)
For a hypothetical fleet spending 100 cores 24/7 on this workload shape, at $0.04/core-hr (public-cloud example rate — replace per engagement):
- cores returned: median 4.4, 95% CI [3.2, 5.5]
(
fleet × (1 − 1/speedup)) - dollars/yr: median $1,540, 95% CI [$1,130, $1,910]
Caveats printed with the number, per policy: single workload shape (large-document batch rendering); Ir-based profile, not cycles; container hardware without governor control; speedup CI is wall-time on pinned single-core execution; ISA = generic x86-64 (no target-cpu narrowing — attempt 1 showed it buys nothing here anyway).
Reproduction
just pin-check comrak # corpus manifest verify
cargo run -p bench-runner -- --config config/accept.toml compare \
--baseline "taskset -c 2 sh -c '<pristine comrak> < corpora/comrak/progit.md > /dev/null'" \
--candidate "taskset -c 2 sh -c '<patched comrak> < corpora/comrak/progit.md > /dev/null'"
Patch: results/phase0/comrak-mimalloc.patch applied at 45c1995f.