How do games like GTA IV not fragment the heap?

Question

I\'m interested in the type of memory management a game like GTA IV might use given that it needs to create and delete lots of objects very quickly. How do the avoid fragmenting

Answer 1

There are two very good malloc implementations for multi-threaded implementations:

• tcmalloc: by Google
• jemalloc: used by Apache (for example)

Here is Facebook's article about improving jemalloc. It's about 5 times faster that Hoard's memory allocator in the current top answer :)