A compacting real-time memory management system

We propose a real real-time memory management system called Compact-fit that offers both time and space pre-dictability. Compact-fit is a compacting memory man-agement system for allocating, deallocating, and access-ing memory in real time. The system provides pre-dictable memory fragmentation and response times that are constant or linear in the size of the request, inde-pendently of the global memory state. We present two Compact-fit implementations and compare them to es-tablished memory management systems, which all fail to provide predictable memory fragmentation. The exper-iments confirm our theoretical complexity bounds and demonstrate competitive performance. In addition, we can control the performance versus fragmentation trade-off via our concept of partial compaction. The sys-tem can be parameterized with the needed level of com-paction, improving the performance while keeping mem-ory fragmentation predictable.