Efficient C++ Performance Programming Techniques

Chapter 6. Single-Threaded Memory Pooling

Frequent memory allocation and deallocation can play a significant role in degrading application performance. The performance degradation stems from the fact that the default memory manager is, by nature, general purpose. An application may use memory in a very specific way and pay a performance penalty for functionality it does not need. You could counter that by developing specialized memory managers. The design space for special-purpose memory managers is multidimensional. At least two dimensions easily come to mind: size and concurrency. The size dimension has two distinct points:

• Fixed-size Memory managers that allocate memory blocks of a single fixed size.

• Variable-size Memory managers that allocate ...