Communications of the ACM

e of 35 dynamic memory allocation algorithms when used to service simulation programs as represented by 18 test cases. Algorithm performance was measured in terms of processing time, memory usage, and external memory fragmentation. Algorithms maintaining separate free space lists for each size of memory block used tended to perform quite well compared with other algorithms. Simple algorithms operating on memory ordered lists (without any free list) performed surprisingly well. Algorithms employing power-of-two block sizes had favorable processing requirements but generally unfavorable memory usage. Algorithms employing LIFO, FIFO, or memory ordered free lists generally performed poorly compared with others.