Attacking the dynamic memory problem for SMPs

We have studied three large object oriented telecommunication server applications. In order to obtain high performance, these applications are executed on SMPs. Dynamic memory management was a serious serialization bottleneck in all applications. The dynamic memory problem was attacked in a number of ways for the three applications, and in this paper we summarize our experiences from these attacks. There are two basic ways of attacking the problem: either to reduce the cost of using dynamic memory or to reduce the usage of dynamic memory. The problem can also be attacked at different levels, i.e. the operating system level, the implementation level, and the software architecture and design level. Each of the investigated ways of attacking the dynamic memory problem has its advantages and disadvantages. We argue that the attack should focus on the operating system level when dealing with existing code and on the software architecture level when developing new applications.