Article

A locality-improving dynamic memory allocator

Authors:

Emery D. BergerAuthors Info & Claims

MSP '05: Proceedings of the 2005 workshop on Memory system performance

Pages 68 - 77

https://doi.org/10.1145/1111583.1111594

Published: 12 June 2005 Publication History

Abstract

In general-purpose applications, most data is dynamically allocated. The memory manager therefore plays a crucial role in application performance by determining the spatial locality of heap objects. Previous general-purpose allocators have focused on reducing fragmentation, while most locality-improving allocators have either focused on improving the locality of the allocator (not the application), or required programmer hints or profiling to guide object placement. We present a high-performance memory allocator called Vam that transparently improves both cache-level and page-level locality of the application while achieving low fragmentation. Over a range of large-footprint benchmarks, Vam improves application performance by an average of 4%-8% versus the Lea (Linux) and FreeBSD allocators. When memory is scarce, Vam improves application performance by up to 2X compared to the FreeBSD allocator, and by over 10X compared to the Lea allocator.

References

[1]

D. F. Bacon, P. Cheng, and V. Rajan. Controlling fragmentation and space consumption in the Metronome, a real-time garbage collector for Java. In ACM SIGPLAN 2003 Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES'2003), San Diego, CA, June 2003. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[2]

D. A. Barrett and B. G. Zorn. Using lifetime predictors to improve memory allocation performance. In Proceedings of SIGPLAN'93 Conference on Programming Languages Design and Implementation, volume 28(6) of ACM SIGPLAN Notices, pages 187--196, Albuquerque, NM, June 1993. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[3]

E. Berger, K. McKinley, R. Blumofe, and P. Wilson. Hoard: A scalable memory allocator for multithreaded applications. In ASPLOS-IX: Ninth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, pages 117--128, Cambridge, MA, Nov. 2000.

Digital Library

[4]

E. D. Berger, B. G. Zorn, and K. S. McKinley. Composing high-performance memory allocators. In Proceedings of SIGPLAN 2001 Conference on Programming Languages Design and Implementation, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Snowbird, Utah, June 2001. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[5]

E. D. Berger, B. G. Zorn, and K. S. McKinley. Reconsidering custom memory allocation. In OOPSLA'02 ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Systems, Languages and Applications, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Seattle, WA, Nov. 2002. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[6]

D. Black, J. Carter, G. Feinberg, R. MacDonald, S. Mangalat, E. Sheinbrood, J. Sciver, and P. Wang. OSF/1 virtual memory improvements. In Proceedings of the USENIX Mac Symposium, pages 87--103, November 1991.

[7]

H.-J. Boehm and M. Weiser. Garbage collection in an uncooperative environment. Software Practice and Experience, 18(9):807--820, 1988.

Digital Library

[8]

T. M. Chilimbi, M. D. Hill, and J. R. Larus. Cache-conscious structure layout. In Proceedings of SIGPLAN'99 Conference on Programming Languages Design and Implementation, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, pages 1--12, Atlanta, May 1999. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[9]

D. Grunwald, B. Zorn, and R. Henderson. Improving the cache locality of memory allocation. In Proceedings of SIGPLAN'93 Conference on Programming Languages Design and Implementation, volume 28(6) of ACM SIGPLAN Notices, pages 177--186, Albuquerque, NM, June 1993. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[10]

D. R. Hanson. A portable storage management system for the Icon programming language. Software Practice and Experience, 10(6):489--500, 1980.

[11]

IA-32 Intel architecture software developer's manual, volume 3: System programming guide. ftp://download.intel.com/design/Pentium4/manuals/25366814.pdf.

[12]

M. S. Johnstone. Non-Compacting Memory Allocation and Real-Time Garbage Collection. PhD thesis, University of Texas at Austin, Dec. 1997.

Digital Library

[13]

M. S. Johnstone and P. R. Wilson. The memory fragmentation problem: Solved? In R. Jones, editor, ISMM'98 Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Memory Management, volume 34(3) of ACM SIGPLAN Notices, pages 26--36, Vancouver, Oct. 1998. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[14]

P.-H. Kamp. Malloc(3) revisited. http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/malloc.pdf.

Digital Library

[15]

S. F. Kaplan, Y. Smaragdakis, and P. R. Wilson. Flexible reference trace reduction for VM simulations. ACM Trans. Model. Comput. Simul., 13(1):1--38, 2003.

Digital Library

[16]

D. Lea. A memory allocator. http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/html/malloc.html.

[17]

M. Pettersson. The perfctr patch for Linux and the perfex tool. http://user.it.uu.se/~mikpe/linux/perfctr/.

[18]

M. L. Seidl and B. G. Zorn. Implementing heap-object behavior prediction efficiently and effectively. Software Practice and Experience, 31(9):869--892, 2001.

Digital Library

[19]

SPEC CPU2000. http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/.

[20]

SPEC CPU2000 memory footprint. http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/analysis/memory/.

[21]

D. N. Truong, F. Bodin, and A. Seznec. Improving cache behavior of dynamically allocated data structures. In IEEE PACT, pages 322--329, 1998.

Digital Library

[22]

P. R. Wilson, M. S. Johnstone, M. Neely, and D. Boles. Dynamic storage allocation: A survey and critical review. In H. Baker, editor, Proceedings of International Workshop on Memory Management, volume 986 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Kinross, Scotland, Sept. 1995. Springer-Verlag.

Digital Library

[23]

T. Yang, E. D. Berger, M. Hertz, S. F. Kaplan, and J. E. B. Moss. Automatic heap sizing: Taking real memory into account. In A. Diwan, editor, ISMM'04 Proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Memory Management, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Vancouver, Oct. 2004. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[24]

B. Zorn and M. Seidl. Segregating heap objects by reference behavior and lifetime. In Eighth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, San Jose, CA, Oct. 1998.

Digital Library

Cited By

Hadjadj YZouaoui CTaleb NMazari SEl Bahri MEl Mezouar M(2023)VCMalloc: A Virtually Contiguous Memory AllocatorIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2023.330273172:12(3431-3442)Online publication date: Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2023.3302731
Appel ANaumann DDing CMaas M(2020)Verified sequential Malloc/FreeProceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management10.1145/3381898.3397211(48-59)Online publication date: 16-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3381898.3397211
Li PLuo HDing CSinger JXu H(2019)Timescale functions for parallel memory allocationProceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management10.1145/3315573.3329987(64-78)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3315573.3329987
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

A locality-improving dynamic memory allocator
1. Information systems
  1. Information storage systems
    1. Storage management
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        File systems management
        Memory management

Recommendations

Redesign the Memory Allocator for Non-Volatile Main Memory
Special Issue on Hardware and Algorithms for Learning On-a-chip and Special Issue on Alternative Computing Systems

The non-volatile memory (NVM) has the merits of byte-addressability, fast speed, persistency and low power consumption, which make it attractive to be used as main memory. Commonly, user process dynamically acquires memory through memory allocators. ...
Dynamic scratchpad memory management for code in portable systems with an MMU

In this work, we present a dynamic memory allocation technique for a novel, horizontally partitioned memory subsystem targeting contemporary embedded processors with a memory management unit (MMU). We propose to replace the on-chip instruction cache ...
The Multics virtual memory: concepts and design

As experience with use of on-line operating systems has grown, the need to share information among system users has become increasingly apparent. Many contemporary systems permit some degree of sharing. Usually, sharing is accomplished by allowing ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

MSP '05: Proceedings of the 2005 workshop on Memory system performance

June 2005

74 pages

ISBN:1595931473

DOI:10.1145/1111583

General Chair:
Brad Calder
U. C, San Diego
,
Program Chair:
Ben Zorn
Microsoft

Copyright © 2005 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 June 2005

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

MSP05

MSP05: Memory Systems Performance Workshop

June 12, 2005

Illinois, Chicago

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 6 of 20 submissions, 30%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

44
Total Citations
View Citations
882
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)40
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)6

Reflects downloads up to 09 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Hadjadj YZouaoui CTaleb NMazari SEl Bahri MEl Mezouar M(2023)VCMalloc: A Virtually Contiguous Memory AllocatorIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2023.330273172:12(3431-3442)Online publication date: Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TC.2023.3302731
Appel ANaumann DDing CMaas M(2020)Verified sequential Malloc/FreeProceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management10.1145/3381898.3397211(48-59)Online publication date: 16-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3381898.3397211
Li PLuo HDing CSinger JXu H(2019)Timescale functions for parallel memory allocationProceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management10.1145/3315573.3329987(64-78)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3315573.3329987
Leijen DZorn Bde Moura L(2019)Mimalloc: Free List Sharding in ActionProgramming Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-030-34175-6_13(244-265)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34175-6_13
Silvestro SLiu HZhang TJung CLee DLiu TOskin MInoue K(2018)SamplerProceedings of the 51st Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture10.1109/MICRO.2018.00027(231-244)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MICRO.2018.00027
Silvestro SLiu HCrosser CLin ZLiu TThuraisingham BEvans DMalkin TXu D(2017)FreeGuardProceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3133956.3133957(2389-2403)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3133956.3133957
Nguyen KFang LXu GDemsky BLu SAlamian SMutlu OKeeton KRoscoe T(2016)YakProceedings of the 12th USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3026877.3026905(349-365)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3026877.3026905
Li PLuo HDing C(2016)Rethinking a heap hierarchy as a cache hierarchy: a higher-order theory of memory demand (HOTM)ACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3241624.292670851:11(111-121)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3241624.2926708
Li PLuo HDing CFlood CZhang Z(2016)Rethinking a heap hierarchy as a cache hierarchy: a higher-order theory of memory demand (HOTM)Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Memory Management10.1145/2926697.2926708(111-121)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2926697.2926708
Kuszmaul B(2015)SuperMalloc: a super fast multithreaded malloc for 64-bit machinesACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2887746.275417850:11(41-55)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2887746.2754178
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten