A Traversable Fixed Size Small Object Allocator in C++

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new fixed-size small object allocator in C++ that improves performance for small object management, especially in multi-threaded environments, with a lightweight traversal structure.

Contribution

It presents a novel lock-free memory allocator for small objects with an integrated traversal structure that uses less memory and offers comparable performance.

Findings

Outperforms standard allocators for large numbers of small objects.

Achieves lock-free synchronization without machine instructions.

Uses less memory than STL containers with similar time performance.

Abstract

At the allocation and deallocation of small objects with fixed size, the standard allocator of the runtime system has commonly a worse time performance compared to allocators adapted for a special application field. We propose a memory allocator, originally developed for mesh primitives but also usable for any other small equally sized objects. For a large amount of objects it leads to better results than allocating data with the C ++new instruction and behaves nowhere worse. The proposed synchronization approach for this allocator behaves lock-free in practical scenarios without using machine instructions, such as compare-and-swap. A traversal structure is integrated requiring less memory than using containers such as STL-vectors or lists, but with comparable time performance.