Hoard memory allocator

The Hoard memory allocator, or Hoard, is a memory allocator for Linux, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and other operating systems. Hoard is designed to be efficient when used by multithreaded applications on multiprocessor computers. Hoard is distributed under the GPL, but can be purchased for proprietary software.

Hoard
Original author(s)Emery Berger, Kathryn S. McKinley, Robert D. Blumofe, Paul R. Willson
Developer(s)Emery Berger, Martin Bachtold, Trey Boudreau, John Calcote, Robert Fleischman, Bo Granlund, John Hickin, Paul Larson, Maged Michael, Kevin Mills, Ganesan Rajagopal, Benoit Rignault
Initial releaseSeptember 29, 1999 (1999-09-29)
Stable release
3.11 / August 5, 2015 (2015-08-05)
Operating systemLinux, OS X, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and others
Available inC++
TypeMemory allocation
LicenseGPL v2 and another one for proprietary software
Websitehoard.org

History

In 2000, its author Emery Berger benchmarked some famous memory allocators and stated Hoard improves the performance of multithreaded applications by providing fast, scalable memory management functions (malloc and free). In particular, it reduces contention for the heap (the central data structure used in dynamic memory allocation) caused when multiple threads allocate or free memory, and avoids the false sharing that can be introduced by memory allocators. At the same time, Hoard has strict bounds on fragmentation.[1]

Hoard continues to be maintained and improved, and is in use by a number of open source and commercial projects.[2][3]

It has also inspired changes to other memory allocators such as the one in OS X since February 2008 (first released in Mac OS X Snow Leopard).[4][5]

References
  1. Berger, E. D.; McKinley, K. S.; Blumofe, R. D.; Wilson, P. R. (November 2000). Hoard: A Scalable Memory Allocator for Multithreaded Applications (PDF). ASPLOS-IX. Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems. pp. 117–128. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.1.4174. doi:10.1145/378993.379232. ISBN 1-58113-317-0.
  2. "An alternative Memory Allocator for the standard glibc". 2007-09-16. Archived from the original on 2011-10-07.
  3. "GNU Common C++ Downloading".
  4. "I'm a Mac (or, "Emery Inside")".
  5. "A look at how malloc works on the Mac".
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