Memory Manager

Question

Hey. I made this simple memory manager and was wondering if anyone has experience in this field.
Specifically I want to learn how to avoid fragmentation and such..

https://code.sololearn.com/c82PJR0bb7tc/?ref=app

If I make each entry a fixed size (larger than anything stored), will this fix any fragmentation issues?

Answer 1

fair enough 😊 it is for learning game programming mostly. i have read that pretty much all "large" games utilize custom memory managers.

it probably overkill but at least I will know how it is done for future reference

Answer 2

Speed and to ensure there is enough memory on execution at runtime for the program to run.

I hear tell memory allocations can be a bottleneck.

so to alleviate this we can grab a big chunk of memory at execution and fill that as required.

If this chunk gets fragmented over time we may/will end up with spaces that can not be filled with anything and therefore is essentially lost.

Answer 3

i found this i am going to try. thought i'd leave it here for anyone who might be interested
https://www.codeproject.com/articles/1083210/an-efficient-cplusplus-fixed-block-memory-allocato

Answer 4

but fragmentation will still occur will it not?

Answer 5

I understood the point, but I think it is too much work for it. If my program has to allocate and relocate memory frequently to some class object, I would just create an object in the outer scope and use a function to reinitialize it instead of creating a new one.

Answer 6

Check something named RAII and smart pointers. If you learn to use those, you won't worry with memory leaks anymore.

Answer 7

Sorry, I fail to see any benefit in avoiding memory to get fragmented. Can you explain what you need that for, please?