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

[Thatcher U. <tu...@tu...>]

On Dec 18, 2002 at 12:38 -0600, brian hook wrote:
> > The reason I ask is because I *know* fragmentation is a problem if
> > malloc sucks, and sucky mallocs have been ubiquitous until recently,
> > but the only empirical study I'm aware of suggests that if malloc
> > doesn't suck, then fragmentation is not a problem.
> > 
> > http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/wilson/papers/fragsolved.pdf
> 
> Okay, went back and browsed that paper, and I don't think it applies.  
> The datasets and object sizes they are looking at aren't representative 
> of what I consider to be normal game. For example, they make the 
> observation that most programs average allocating objects of about 6-7 
> different sizes.  Any game that loads models, textures or sound will 
> almost definitely not fit into this area.

Possibly; it would be interesting to see numbers on some actual games.

> And they don't take into account run times of weeks or months.  

Here's a paper that addresses server apps, although they seem more
fixated on multithreading performance than memory utilization.
Anyway, their measurements of memory utilization for dlmalloc look
extremely good.  They do use the dreaded "random chunk allocation"
methodology.

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/221661.html

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich
http://tulrich.com