Memory Pool

Memory Pool

Memory pools, also called fixed-size-blocks allocation, allow dynamic memory allocation comparable to malloc or C++'s operator new. As those implementations suffer from fragmentation because of variable block sizes, it can be impossible to use them in a real time system due to performance. A more efficient solution is preallocating a number of memory blocks with the same size called the memory pool. The application can allocate, access, and free blocks represented by handles at run time.

Many real-time operating systems use memory pools, such as the Transaction Processing Facility.

Some systems, like the web server Nginx, use the term memory pool to refer to a group of variable-size allocations which can be later deallocated all at once. This is also known as a region; see region-based memory management.