The allocation and disposal of memory is a ubiquitous operation in most programs. Rarely do programmers concern themselves with details of memory allocators; most assume that memory allocators provided by the system perform well. This paper presents a performance evaluation of the reference locality of dynamic storage allocation algorithms based on trace-driven simulation of five large allocation-intensive C programs. In this paper, we show how the design of a memory allocator can significantly affect the reference locality for various applications. Our measurements show that poor locality in sequential-fit allocation algorithms reduces program performance, both by increasing paging and cache miss rates. While increased paging can be debilitating on any architecture, cache misses rates are also important for modern computer architectures. We show that algorithms attempting to be space-efficient by coalescing adjacent free objects show poor reference locality, possibly negating the benef...

... In this paper, we describe a program (CustoMalloc) that synthesizes a memory allocator customized for a specific application. Our experiments show that the synthesized allocators are uniformly faster and more space efficient than the Berkeley UNIX allocator. Constructing a custom allocator requires little programmer effort, usually taking only a few minutes. Experience has shown that the synthesized allocators are not overly sensitive to properties of input sets and the resulting allocators are superior even to domain-specific allocators designed by programmers. Measurements show that synthesized allocators are from two to ten times faster than widelyused allocators

Because dynamic memory management is an important part of a large class of computer programs, high-performance algorithms for dynamic memory management have been, and will continue to be, of considerable interest. We evaluate and compare models of the memory allocation behavior in actual programs and investigate how these models can be used to explore the performance of memory management algorithms. These models, if accurate enough, provide an attractive alternative to algorithm evaluation based on trace-driven simulation using actual traces. We explore a range of models of increasing complexity including models that have been used by other researchers. Based on our analysis, we draw three important conclusions. First, a very simple model, which generates a uniform distribution around the mean of observed values, is often quite accurate. Second, two new models we propose show greater accuracy than those previously described in the literature. Finally, none of the models investigated ap...