The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Jul. 30, 2002
Filed:
Jun. 13, 2000
Alan McGowen, San Jose, CA (US);
Ashish Karkare, Santa Clara, CA (US);
Hewlett-Packard Company, Palo Alto, CA (US);
Abstract
A memory allocator provides a cache blocks private to each thread of a multi-threaded application, and thereby minimizes performance losses associated with mutual exclusion (MUTEX) contention, MUTEX locking and/or coalescence operations. The memory allocator maintains thread local cache slots in a linked list of arrays. Upon a memory allocation request from a thread, blocks of the memory, which ordinarily require MUTEX locking, are cached in the local thread cache slot allocated to the requesting thread, and the request is satisfied from the cache slot allocated to the requesting thread. Each cache slot is private to the thread to which it is assigned, and thus does not require MUTEX locking. Further, the cache slots do not require defragmentation thereof, and thus require no coalescence operations. Thus, the performance of the multi-threaded application program is optimized.