An experimental study on user-level memory allocators in middleware applications

Abstract

Memory allocations are one of the most ubiquitous operations in computer programs. The performance of the routines that implement these operations is very important although it is frequently neglected. This paper presents a comparative analysis of seven largely adopted memory allocators. Unlike other related works, based on artificial benchmark tests, we evaluate the selected allocators using real-world stock trading applications. The experimental study considers the applications' response time, memory consumption, and memory fragmentation. All tests are evaluated with respect to different combinations of processor cores. The results indicate that for workloads based on memory allocations up to 64 bytes and all combinations of processor cores up to four, the best average response time and memory usage is obtained using the TCMalloc memory allocator, followed by the Ptmalloc version 3.