Characterization of Dynamic Memory Allocations in Real-World Applications: An Experimental Study

Dynamic memory allocation is one of the most ubiquitous operations in computer programs. In order to design effective memory allocation algorithms, it is a major requirement to understand the most frequent memory allocation patterns present in modern applications. In this paper, we present an experimental characterization study of dynamic memory allocations in seven real-world widely used applications. The results show consistent allocation/deallocation patterns present in different applications. Especially, we observe that most of the allocations fitted a well-defined range of block sizes. Also, we found that more than 70% of all dynamically allocated memory lasted no more than 0.1 second in the investigated applications. These and other findings of this study are useful for research works planning synthetic workloads related to dynamic memory allocations.