Object Pool Pattern

The object pool pattern is a software creational design pattern that uses a set of initialised objects kept ready to use, rather than allocating and destroying them on demand. A client of the pool will request an object from the pool and perform operations on the returned object. When the client has finished, it returns the object, which is a specific type of factory object, to the pool rather than destroying it.

Object pooling can offer a significant performance boost in situations where the cost of initializing a class instance is high, the rate of instantiation of a class is high, and the number of instances in use at any one time is low. The pooled object is obtained in predictable time when creation of the new objects (especially over network) may take variable time.

However these benefits are mostly true for objects that are expensive with respect to time, such as database connections, socket connections, threads and large graphic objects like fonts or bitmaps. In certain situations, simple object pooling (that hold no external resources, but only occupy memory) may not be efficient and could decrease performance.

Read more about Object Pool Pattern:  Handling of Empty Pools, Pitfalls, Criticism, Examples

Famous quotes containing the words object, pool and/or pattern:

    The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.
    Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)

    A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.
    Joan Didion (b. 1934)

    I am the very pattern of a modern Major-Gineral,
    I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral;
    I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical,
    From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical;
    Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)