Evaluate the Fragmentation Effect of Different Heap Allocation Algorithms in Linux

Abstract: Modern application are becoming more complex and demanding in terms of resource utilization. LTE network is part of those applications. Efficient memory utilization poses a great challenge to developers. The dynamic memory allocations and de allocations over the program execution time leads to a problem called memory fragmentation, which can eventually lead the system out of memory. Currently there are many allocators that are specifically designed for dynamic memory management. This thesis contains the study and analysis of three different allocators, ptmalloc2, tcmalloc and tlsf. The goal of the thesis is the evaluation of their performance in terms of memory fragmentation and cpu execution time. The allocators are tested against a real program tracing file, which contains a sequence of allocations and deallocations captured from an executing process.