Re: Fragmentation was RE: [GD-General] Compile times

[brian h. <bri...@py...>]

> Has anyone been bitten when using a decent malloc?

To clarify, I don't think fragmentation is a problem UNLESS you have a 
particular sequence of allocations that kick your ass and/or you have 
extremely long up times.  I think MUDs have actually run into this type 
of problem before, but on much smaller scales (e.g. 16MB MUDs running 
on older boxes with maybe 32MB installed, no VM, etc. -- similar to 
what consoles deal with today).

The average PC game simply won't have to deal with address space 
fragmentation -- many force a reset between levels, others just don't 
run long enough to make it a problem.  Unfortunately some stuff I've 
worked on hasn't been "average" in terms of scale, so I'm extremely 
attuned to this.

And if you blow off fragmentation on something like a Palm or GBA, it 
will probably bite you in the ass one of these days.  Unless you're 
using something that can compact behind the scenes, it's a problem, no 
matter how good the underlying malloc implementation may be.  The 
underlying implementation simply determines WHEN it affects you.

-Hook