JEFF and STEVE: Allocator and Analysis Tool The Tales of The Compacting Allocator JEFF and His Friend STEVE, The Malloc Benchmarking and Analysis Tool

Abstract

Jeff is a compacting allocator and Steve is an allocator benchmarking tool. Steve can be used to benchmark any application with any allocator. Steve records memory traces of an application during execution and uses those traces to benchmark any number of allocators for which there are drivers. Therefore, the performance in actual use cases is measured. Also, as a consequence, the user does not need access to source code to the application or allocators to be tested. Users can easily write their own allocator drivers to extend Steve with. Compared to the tested allocators in this report, Jeff performs similar or better in terms of speed, but similar or worse in memory.