Re: SmartHeap memory management with Ada

[Nick Lewins <nick@ccis.adisys.com.au>]

(mailed to wwgrol@PSESERV3.FW.HAC.COM)

> Anyone listening who has any knowledge of how the SmartHeap memory
> manager from MicroQuill performs when used with Ada programs?

It depends on how your Ada compiler currently implements
its memory management operations.  We did a couple of
trials with smartheap last year.  The runtimes we tested were:
.  Alsys AdaWorld 5.5.3 default memory allocator
.  custom version of above runtime which calls OS malloc
   for each memory allocation
.  as above using the smartheap version of malloc

For our application under HP-UX, the smartheap code only
showed a little performance increase over the OS malloc, which
was miles better than the compiler's own memory allocator.
We never got time to do comprehensive testing, though.

Smartheap has some great features, particularly useful when
your application is running in an environment low in real
memory (ie: there is swapping going on).  Check out their
white paper (from their website) for more info.  

MicroQuill have me a free evaluation licence for these trials,
and were very supportive.  It's also very easy to use -
just relink your application with the smartheap library.
The only problem is that we had to get a custom version of
the Ada runtime which called malloc rather than using its
own (fairly badly behaved) memory management algorithms.

You might also want to check out the malloc which comes
with the GNU gcc compiler.

The tests were on HP-UX 10.10, BTW.

Nick Lewins
System Architect
ADI Command and Control Information Systems
nick@adied.oz.au / nick@ccis.adisys.com.au