A study of the allocation behavior of C++ programs

Abstract

The object-oriented programming (OOP) language systems tend to perform object creation and deletion prolifically. An empirical study has shown that C++ programs can have 10 times more memory allocation and deallocation than comparable C programs. However, the allocation behavior of C++ programs is rarely reported. This paper attempts to locate where the dynamic memory allocations are coming from and report an empirical study of the allocation behavior of C++ programs. Firstly, this paper summarizes the hypothesis of situations that invoke the dynamic memory management explicitly and implicitly. They are: constructors, copy constructors, overloading assignment operator=, type conversions and application-specific member functions. Secondly, the development of a source code level tracing tool is reported as a procedure to investigate the hypothesis. Most of the five C++ programs traced are real-world applications. Thirdly, allocation patterns, object size and age distribution are summarized. Among other things, we found that objects tend to have a very short life-span, and most of them are created through constructors and copy constructors. With these findings, we may improve the performance of dynamic memory management through, a profile-based strategy or reusing objects.