Memory Management Tutorial

Welcome to the interactive memory management tutorial. This tutorial will present a complete description of basic sequential fit memory management algorithms (first fit, best fit, worst fit), along with the buddy method. Along with the tutorial presentation are a series of Java applets that permit you to try out the various techniques to help understand how they work. We then provide an applet to let you compare the performance of the various methods. The tutorial concludes with a discussion of ways in which memory managers can deal with memory requests that they are unable to fill from available free memory.

Java note: The Java applets in this tutorial were compiled using Java 1.6. To run them, your browser must be equipped with Java 1.6 or later.

Section 1 - Introduction

Section 2 - Dynamic Storage Allocation

    Section 2.1 - Sequential-Fit Methods

    Section 2.2 - Performance of Sequential-Fit Methods

    Section 2.3 - Buddy Methods

    Section 2.4 - Other Memory Allocation Methods

Section 3 - Failure Policies and Garbage Collection