Efficient Memory Allocator with Better Performance and Less Memory Usage

摘要

Dynamic memory allocator is critical for native (C and C++) programs (malloc and free for C; new and delete for C++). Current memory allocator adopts a common design that organizes memory into several bins of fixed sizes to achieve fast memory allocation and de-allocation. This paper shows that this design would essentially introduce large ratio of memory fragmentation and thus lead to memory waste and degraded performance, especially for allocation intensive applications. To address this problem, we introduce a dynamic strategy to create customized bins of special sizes. Unlike the standard bins in previous general memory allocators, the customized bins created in our memory allocator can better fit allocations of special sizes and reduce memory fragmentation and usage, thus improve performance and space efficiency. Experimental results show that our new memory allocator can achieve up to 1.7x speedup (averagely over 18.8%) over the state-of-the-art memory allocator Hoard with 22% less memory usage.