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Memory management (also dynamic memory management, dynamic storage allocation, or dynamic memory allocation) is a form of resource management applied to computer memory.The essential requirement of memory management is to provide ways to dynamically allocate portions of memory to programs at their request, and free it for reuse when no longer needed.
Such blocks are used to store data objects or arrays of objects. Most structured and object-oriented languages provide an area of memory, called the heap or free store, from which objects are dynamically allocated. The example C code below illustrates how structure objects are dynamically allocated and referenced.
The C programming language manages memory statically, automatically, or dynamically.Static-duration variables are allocated in main memory, usually along with the executable code of the program, and persist for the lifetime of the program; automatic-duration variables are allocated on the stack and come and go as functions are called and return.
In operating systems, memory management is the function responsible for managing the computer's primary memory. [1]: 105–208 The memory management function keeps track of the status of each memory location, either allocated or free. It determines how memory is allocated among competing processes, deciding which gets memory, when they receive ...
When a program is run, memory is often dynamically allocated in two places: the stack and the heap. Memory is continuously allocated on a stack but not on a heap, thus reflective of their names. Stack also refers to a programming construct, thus to differentiate it, this stack is referred to as the program's function call stack. Technically ...
It would be beneficial to allocate memory aligned to cache lines. If an array is partitioned for more than one thread to operate on, having the sub-array boundaries unaligned to cache lines could lead to performance degradation. Here is an example to allocate memory (double array of size 10) aligned to cache of 64 bytes.
Memory pools, also called fixed-size blocks allocation, is the use of pools for memory management that allows dynamic memory allocation. Dynamic memory allocation can, and has been achieved through the use of techniques such as malloc and C++'s operator new; although established and reliable implementations, these suffer from fragmentation ...
Each allocated memory block is given a master descriptor with the properties of the block — physical address, size, and whether it is present in main memory or not, in which case on first access the block must be allocated, or if there is an address, it is an address on secondary storage and must be loaded to main memory.