A Quantitative Comparison of Memory Allocators for Multicore and Multithread Applications

Abstract

Memory allocations are one of the most omnipresent operations in computer programs. The performance of memory allocation operations is a very important aspect to be considered in software design, however it is frequently neglected. This paper presents an experimental comparative study of seven largely adopted memory allocators. Unlike other related works, we assess the selected memory allocators using real-world multithreaded applications. We consider the applications' response time, memory consumption, and memory fragmentation, in order to compare the performance of the investigated memory allocators running on a multicore machine. All test results are evaluated with respect to their statistical significance throughout the statistical ANOVA method.