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Practical Efficient Memory Management

A good memory management architecture is one of those key features that can make the difference between a successful application and an unsuccessful one. For realtime applications the memory architecture becomes critical. This article discovers how memory management is more than tracking where your malloc() and free() are located. Although the focus will be on realtime applications implemented in C, all the techniques described here can be translated to other scenarios because the terms described are language-independent.

The best memory management is doing no allocation at all. You should architect your software to minimize the interaction with the memory manager. In the past that was a realistic option but in modern architectures that objective becomes harder to achieve. Modern requisites for realtime architectures like, for example, content streaming or hot loading force us to have frequent interactions with the memory manager. This article describes how this can be done efficiently. The ideas provided plus the links to other articles will give you enough information to implement your own solution. No downloadable code is provided with this article but if you need help implementing the ideas described here do not hesitate to contact the author.

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