Comment 6 for bug 1908805

Description of the tunable parameters can be seen on the glibc manual: https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Memory-Allocation-Tunables.html

I don't know the exact versions where each configuration parameter was added and fully supported, but I see that the M_ARENA_MAX environmental variable was added back in 2009 (https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=commit;h=425ce2edb9d11cc1ff650fac16dfbc450241896a), so probably in glibc version 2.10

In my opinion there should be no trade-off for Python programs, since the independent arenas are meant to reduce congestion (due to the locking) for multi-threaded applications that do a considerable amount of memory reserve and free operations, but in Python we have the GIL, so we are already suffering the penalties of the locking and won't benefit from that performance improvement.