Suggestion on memory allocators

[svijayan]

Hello All -
memory allocation operation has been identified as a bottle neck in one of my low latency application. current design uses boost memory pool and hoard.

What kind of optimizations are available in this area ?
Well memory pools are an obvious solutions, what has been the industry experience ?
would like to hear from other their experiences .

thanks
svijayan

 

[KaiRu]

Hi

What exactly shows that Boost.Pool is a bottle neck and what interface do you use? Is your app multithreaded? Maybe it's not allocator itself but just a contention for the single pointer. Have you looked at other malloc improvements?

As for custom allocators - there is no silver bullet. If your application works in request/response mode you can allocate all the memory for temp variables at once (linear allocator) in a signle request to the malloc function and then just shift the pointer every time you need memory to create a temp variable. It's the easiest one and this is how some of the high performance web servers do their work - allocate once on request, free everything on responce.

You might want to look at game dev to learn about allocators. Anyway, there is a good article about allocators to begin with http://www.spuify.co.uk/?p=454