An experimental comparison analysis of kernel-level memory allocators
Tais B. Ferreira, Rivalino Matias, Autran Macêdo, Bruno Evangelista · 2015
Memory management is one of the most important tasks of an operating system, since it has significant impact on the whole computing systems performance. The kernel memory allocator is the main OS subsystem responsible for this task, which has to deal with problems intrinsic to dynamic memory allocations, such as memory fragmentation and allocation overhead. In this paper, we present an experimental comparison analysis of four real implementations of kernel memory allocators: SLAB, SLOB, SLUB, and SLQB. This study considered the execution time, memory consumption, and memory fragmentation degree of all allocators under the same workload. Based on the findings obtained experimentally, in most of the cases, the memory allocator with best general performance was the SLOB, followed by SLAB, SLUB, and SLQB.