Efficient C++ Performance Programming Techniques

Key Points

• Flexibility trades off with speed. As the power and flexibility of memory management increases, execution speed decreases.

• The global memory manager (implemented by new() and delete()) is general purpose and consequently expensive.

• Specialized memory managers can be more than an order of magnitude faster than the global one.

• If you allocate mostly memory blocks of a fixed size, a specialized fixed-size memory manager will provide a significant performance boost.

• A similar boost is available if you allocate mostly memory blocks that are confined to a single thread. A single-threaded memory manager will help by skipping over the concurrency issues that the global new() and delete() must handle.