Memory Management
After reading the previous chapters, it should no longer come as a surprise that the way we handle memory can have a huge impact on performance. The CPU spends a lot of time shuffling data between the CPU registers and the main memory (loading and storing data to and from the main memory). As shown in Chapter 4, Data Structures, the CPU uses memory caches to speed up access to memory, and programs need to be cache-friendly in order to run quickly.
This chapter will reveal more aspects of how computers work with memory so that you know which things must be considered when tuning memory usage. In addition, this chapter covers:
- Automatic memory allocation and dynamic memory management.
- The life cycle of a C++ object and how to manage object ownership.
- Efficient memory management. Sometimes, there are hard memory limits that force us to keep our data representation compact, and sometimes, we have plenty of memory available but need the program...
