📄 README: Custom Memory Allocator Comparison

🚀 Project Overview

This project demonstrates and benchmarks custom memory allocators:

• Pool Allocator
• Arena Allocator
• Slab Allocator

These allocator designs help manage memory more efficiently than standard malloc/new, especially in performance-critical systems like game engines, embedded systems, or high-performance services.

We compare performance via:

• Allocation speed
• Arithmetic operation speed on allocated memory
• Cache locality and fragmentation impact

The goal is to understand how these allocators manage memory more efficiently in specific scenarios by:

• Reducing memory fragmentation
• Improving cache locality
• Minimizing allocation overhead

This project provides clean, isolated implementations of each allocator and includes simple arithmetic workloads to test their practical impact on allocation speed and memory access performance.

The project also includes build scripts (CMake) to make it portable across Linux (GCC/Clang) and Windows (MSVC), along with profiling instructions for analyzing performance using tools like perf, valgrind, and Visual Studio Profiler.

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📚 What Are These Allocators?

Allocator	Description	Use Cases
Pool Allocator	Allocates fixed-size small objects from a pre-allocated pool. Fast, O(1) allocations.	Small, frequent allocations, object pools
Arena Allocator	Allocates large chunks (arenas) and performs linear allocations within them.	Fast bulk allocations, resets in bulk
Slab Allocator	Organizes memory into slabs of blocks; useful for managing objects of similar type and size.	Kernel allocators, caching, object reuse

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⚙️ Build Instructions

# Clone the repository
git clone Memory_Fragmentation_and_Cache_Efficiency
cd Memory_Fragmentation_and_Cache_Efficiency
# Create build directory and compile
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build
./build/... /...

🚀 Running the Programs

Executable	Description	Example Command
main	General performance runner	./main
arena_allocator	Arena allocator allocation benchmark	./arena_allocator
slab_allocator	Slab allocator benchmark	./slab_allocator
pool_allocator	Pool allocator benchmark	./pool_allocator

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