29K views · Sep 14, 2019 · 40:18 · 3 HN recommenders · 4 mentions · discussed 2020–2025
Bobby Powers presents Mesh, a drop-in malloc replacement that eliminates memory fragmentation in unmodified C/C++ programs by compacting memory. The talk covers how it works despite C's fixed object addresses, and its benefits for programs like Redis.
Why Hacker News points people here: Recommended as a great talk on solving fragmentation for C/C++ and runtimes like Ruby and Python without code changes.
“There was a great talk at Strange Loop about a drop-in malloc replacement which compacts.”HN comment, 2022
“how to make a malloc() and free() that perform compaction”
Talk on a malloc that compacts memory to return it to the OS.
There's an interesting talk [0] from Bobby Powers on how to make a malloc() and free() that perform compaction, to be able to release memory back to the operating system more frequently (and improve cache hit rates, etc.). But this isn't standard at all yet. [1]: this video
“There was a great talk at Strange Loop about a drop-in malloc replacement which compacts.”
Drop-in compacting malloc replacement that improved memory use in projects like Redis.
There was a great talk at Strange Loop about a drop-in malloc replacement which compacts. Apparently it actually led to memory usage improvements in industrial projects like Redis: this video
“also a good presentation about it on youtube.”
Presentation on merging sparse memory pages, a kind of garbage collection for C/C++.
There’s a great paper from the group of Emery Berger, where they merge memory pages that become sparse. A kind of garbage collection for C and C++ languages. There’s also a good presentation about it on youtube. link The presentation: this video
“there's been some interesting progress on that front”
Shows progress on reducing fragmentation overhead in malloc/free systems.
> but malloc/free based systems also have a relatively high memory overhead due to fragmentation In case you haven't seen it, there's been some interesting progress on that front: this video
