An efficient heap management technique with Minimum Fragmentation and Auto Compaction

Heap management is responsible for the allocation of heap segments to a running application. When the logic of the heap management is left to the application programmer, as it is the case with programming languages like C and C++, a number of problems may arise. One kind of problems related to imperfect heap management is that of memory fragmentation. Hence compaction of data is required to increase the efficient data storage capacity of the memory. Depending on whether active blocks within the heap may be shifted in position, one of the two approaches to compaction is possible: partial compaction and full compaction. But both these methods are too expensive and hence they are generally not used in large program modules. In this paper a new heap management technique MFAC (Minimum Fragmentation and Auto Compaction) is proposed which has an inherent auto compaction technique in its algorithm leading to minimum fragmentation of memory space. Simulation results show that in most scenarios, MFAC outperforms the 1^st fit and best fit technique by a considerable margin.