Re: Something is broken in repack

From: Wolfram Gloger <wmglo@dent.med.uni-muenchen.de>
Date: Dec 14, 2007, 16:45 UTC
Message-ID: <20071214165937.6405.qmail@md.dent.med.uni-muenchen.de>
In-Reply-To: <85r6hptecs.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>

Hi,

> Uh what?  Someone crank out his copy of "The Art of Computer
> Programming", I think volume 1.  Best fit is known (analyzed and proven
> and documented decades ago) to be one of the worst strategies for memory
> allocation.  Exactly because it leads to huge fragmentation problems.

Well, quoting http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/html/malloc.html:

"As shown by Wilson et al, best-fit schemes (of various kinds and approximations) tend to produce the least fragmentation on real loads compared to other general approaches such as first-fit."

See [Wilson 1995] ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/garbage/allocsrv.ps for more details and references.

Regards, Wolfram.