Inefficient memory management
The subject of memory management in C++ can merit a book all of its own. There are dozens if not hundreds of papers dedicated just to the issue of the STL allocators. In this chapter, we will focus on several problems that tend to affect performance the most. Some have simple solutions; for others, we will describe the issue and outline the possible solution approaches.
There are two types of memory-related problems that you may run into in the context of performance. The first one is using too much memory: your program either runs out of memory or doesn’t meet the memory use requirements. The second problem occurs when your program becomes memory-bound: its performance is limited by the speed of memory access. Often, in these cases, the runtime of the program is directly related to how much memory it uses, and reducing the memory use also makes the program run faster.
The material presented in this section is helpful mostly for programmers...
