ABT and SBT Revisited: Efficient Memory Management Techniques for Object Oriented and Web-based Applications

Dynamic memory management is an important and essential part of computer systems design. Efficient memory allocation, garbage collection, and compaction are becoming critical in parallel and distributed applications using object oriented languages like C and Java. In addition to achieving fast allocation/de-allocation of memory objects and fragmentation, memory management techniques should strive to improve the overall execution performance of object oriented applications. In this paper, we introduce Address Ordered and Segregated Binary Trees, two memory management techniques particularly efficient for object oriented applications. Our empirical results manifest that both ABT and SBT when accompanied by coalescing outperform existing allocators such as Segregated free lists in terms of storage utilization and execution performance. We also show that these new allocators perform well in terms of storage utilization, even without coalescing. This is in particular suitable for web-applications.