HMalloc: A Hybrid, Scalable, and Lock-Free Memory Allocator for Multi-Threaded Applications

Abstract

An efficient multi-threaded memory allocator has great impact on performance of applications with frequent memory allocation and deallocation operations. Currently, most popular memory allocators ignore the difference between thread local and shared memory, and manage them in a unified manner, which cannot make good use of the spatiotemporal locality of memory access. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a hybrid and lock-free multi-threaded memory allocator, named HMalloc. The allocator separates local memory from shared memory. There is no false sharing and lock contentions in local memory allocation and deallocation process. Moreover, coalescence-free is used to optimize this process. Further, a flag-based shared memory allocation and deallocation method is proposed to achieve lock-free shared memory management. Experimental results show that HMalloc can achieve significant performance improvement when compared with existing well-known memory allocators.