Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
This diagram represents five contiguous memory regions which each hold a pointer and a data block. The List Head points to the 2nd element, which points to the 5th, which points to the 3rd, thereby forming a linked list of available memory regions. A free list (or freelist) is a data structure used in a scheme for dynamic memory allocation.
Like stack allocation, regions facilitate allocation and deallocation of memory with low overhead; but they are more flexible, allowing objects to live longer than the stack frame in which they were allocated. In typical implementations, all objects in a region are allocated in a single contiguous range of memory addresses, similarly to how ...
Informally, unreachable memory is dynamic memory that the program cannot reach directly, nor get to by starting at an object it can reach directly, and then following a chain of pointer references. In dynamic memory allocation implementations that employ a garbage collector , objects are reclaimed after they become unreachable.
Catastrophic failure of the dynamic memory management system may result when an object's backing memory is deleted out from under it more than once; an object is explicitly destroyed more than once; when, while using a pointer to manipulate an object not allocated on the free store, a programmer attempts to release said pointer's target object ...
Stop-and-copy garbage collection in a Lisp architecture: [1] Memory is divided into working and free memory; new objects are allocated in the former. When it is full (depicted), garbage collection is performed: All data structures still in use are located by pointer tracing and copied into consecutive locations in free memory.
It is difficult to compare the two cases directly, as their behavior depends on the situation. For example, in the best case for a garbage collecting system, allocation just increments a pointer, but in the best case for manual heap allocation, the allocator maintains freelists of specific sizes and allocation only requires following a pointer.
A memory debugger is a debugger for finding software memory problems such as memory leaks and buffer overflows. These are due to bugs related to the allocation and deallocation of dynamic memory . Programs written in languages that have garbage collection , such as managed code , might also need memory debuggers, e.g. for memory leaks due to ...