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"Compacting the Uncompactable" by Bobby Powers

Strange Loop Conference · 29.2K views · 2019-09-14 · 40:18

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

Recommended as a great talk on solving fragmentation for C/C++ and runtimes like Ruby and Python without code changes.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2020–2025

Topics

C, C++, Rust, Go & systems languagesSoftware performance & optimization
Search by tags
mallocmemory fragmentationcompactionmeshc++

What people said

superjan · 2025-01 · Recommendation

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: [VIDEO]

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rtfeldman · 2022-07 · Recommendation

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: [VIDEO]

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remexre · 2020-12 · Recommendation

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]: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Strange Loop Conference, played through YouTube.

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