Why you should (or should you?) roll your own memory manager (Part 1)
2011-10-06 10:51
Intro
Do you write performance-critical applications? Do you feel that the built in memory manager in C/C++ does not do the trick for you? Then this article might be of interest :)
All optimizations must however be based on real data so if a custom memory manager does not improve the performance of your application (or maybe some other aspect), do not use it!
In high performance applications (for example games), allocation of dynamic memory can be a real bottleneck and should be kept to a minimum. Of course, it is impossible to avoid altogether and something has to be done.
The built in memory manager in C/C++ has to handle a lot of different allocation patterns in a good way. It has to be able to allocate many small blocks of memory as well as large blocks and it has no knowledge of the data it has to allocate memory for. This is probably not the case in your own application. You will know what kind of data your application handles and therefore can make very important assumptions to make memory management more efficient and simple whereas the built in memory manager has to be everything to every application. This makes it inefficient and also too complicated in some cases.
It also suffers in performance from the fact that is has to switch from user to kernel mode for each request. This can be avoided with custom memory management where a large block of memory can be allocated up front and memory request satisifed from this block. This means that no mode-switching occurs and we can avoid that bottleneck.
Placement new
To be able to write your own memory manager and control how data is
laid out in memory, there is an important operator in C/C++ that you
have to know: placement new.
Placement new lets you specify a memory address where you want to
place your objects.
void *buffer = new byte[SOME_SIZE];
MyObject *obj = new (buffer) MyObject();This will place the new instance of MyObject at the start of
buffer. This operator allows you to control your memory allocation
patterns.
Important to note here is that memory allocated by placement new can
not be freed with delete. The object destructor has to be called
explicitly: obj->~MyObject();.
When to allocate the memory?
Your application will often have some kind of “memory budget”, the maximum amount of memory it can use. Then it can be a good idea to allocate a chunk of memory that big when the application starts up and then divide it and use it (as suggested by Christian Gyrling here).
You probably need some extra memory for debugging purposes so you can allocate that memory in a separate “debugging” chunk.
Of course it is also possible to allocate memory “as we go” and your custom memory manager will still make it a lot easier to keep track of your memory usage, detect memory leaks, make memory alignment easier etc.
In the next part, I will get down to business and show some allocator implementations. So until then, think about your data access patterns ;)
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