What is memory fragmentation?

What is memory fragmentation?

Memory fragmentation is when most of your memory is allocated in a large number of non-contiguous blocks, or chunks - leaving a good percentage of your total memory unallocated, but unusable for most typical scenarios. This results in out of memory exceptions, or allocation errors (i.e. malloc returns null).

The easiest way to think about this is to imagine you have a big empty wall that you need to put pictures of varying sizes on. Each picture takes up a certain size and you obviously can't split it into smaller pieces to make it fit. You need an empty spot on the wall, the size of the picture, or else you can't put it up. Now, if you start hanging pictures on the wall and you're not careful about how you arrange them, you will soon end up with a wall that's partially covered with pictures and even though you may have empty spots most new pictures won't fit because they're larger than the available spots. You can still hang really small pictures, but most ones won't fit. So you'll have to re-arrange (compact) the ones already on the wall to make room for more..

Now, imagine that the wall is your (heap) memory and the pictures are objects.. That's memory fragmentation..

How can I tell if memory fragmentation is a problem for my application? What kind of program is most likely to suffer?

A telltale sign that you may be dealing with memory fragmentation is if you get many allocation errors, especially when the percentage of used memory is high - but not you haven't yet used up all the memory - so technically you should have plenty of room for the objects you are trying to allocate.

When memory is heavily fragmented, memory allocations will likely take longer because the memory allocator has to do more work to find a suitable space for the new object. If in turn you have many memory allocations (which you probably do since you ended up with memory fragmentation) the allocation time may even cause noticeable delays.

What are good common ways to deal with memory fragmentation?

Use a good algorithm for allocating memory. Instead of allocating memory for a lot of small objects, pre-allocate memory for a contiguous array of those smaller objects. Sometimes being a little wasteful when allocating memory can go along way for performance and may save you the trouble of having to deal with memory fragmentation.

Imagine that you have a "large" (32 bytes) expanse of free memory:

----------------------------------
|                                |
----------------------------------

Now, allocate some of it (5 allocations):

----------------------------------
|aaaabbccccccddeeee              |
----------------------------------

Now, free the first four allocations but not the fifth:

----------------------------------
|              eeee              |
----------------------------------

Now, try to allocate 16 bytes. Oops, I can't, even though there's nearly double that much free.

On systems with virtual memory, fragmentation is less of a problem than you might think, because large allocations only need to be contiguous in virtual address space, not in physical address space. So in my example, if I had virtual memory with a page size of 2 bytes then I could make my 16 byte allocation with no problem. Physical memory would look like this:

----------------------------------
|ffffffffffffffeeeeff            |
----------------------------------

whereas virtual memory (being much bigger) could look like this:

------------------------------------------------------...
|              eeeeffffffffffffffff                   
------------------------------------------------------...

The classic symptom of memory fragmentation is that you try to allocate a large block and you can't, even though you appear to have enough memory free. Another possible consequence is the inability of the process to release memory back to the OS (because each of the large blocks it has allocated from the OS, for malloc etc. to sub-divide, has something left in it, even though most of each block is now unused).

Tactics to prevent memory fragmentation in C++ work by allocating objects from different areas according to their size and/or their expected lifetime. So if you're going to create a lot of objects and destroy them all together later, allocate them from a memory pool. Any other allocations you do in between them won't be from the pool, hence won't be located in between them in memory, so memory will not be fragmented as a result. Or, if you're going to allocate a lot of objects of the same size then allocate them from the same pool. Then a stretch of free space in the pool can never be smaller than the size you're trying to allocate from that pool.

Generally you don't need to worry about it much, unless your program is long-running and does a lot of allocation and freeing. It's when you have mixtures of short-lived and long-lived objects that you're most at risk, but even then malloc will do its best to help. Basically, ignore it until your program has allocation failures or unexpectedly causes the system to run low on memory (catch this in testing, for preference!).

The standard libraries are no worse than anything else that allocates memory, and standard containers all have an Alloc template parameter which you could use to fine-tune their allocation strategy if absolutely necessary.