Memory Allocation Costs in Large C and C++ Programs

Dynamic storage allocation is an important part of a large class of computer programs written in C and C High performance algorithms for dynamic storage allocation have been and will continue to be of considerable interest This paper presents detailed measurements of the cost of dynamic storage allocation in diverse C and C programs using ve very di erent dynamic storage allocation implementations including a conservative garbage collection algorithm Four of the allocator implementations measured are publicly available on the Internet A number of the programs used in these measurements are also available on the Internet to facilitate further research in dynamic storage allocation Finally the data presented in this paper is an abbreviated version of more extensive statistics that are also publically available on the Internet