| Memory Footprint |
Article Index for Memory |
Website Links For Memory |
Information AboutMemory Footprint |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT MEMORY FOOTPRINT | |
| computer programming | |
|
Memory footprint refers to the amount of main memory that a program uses or references while running. This includes all sorts of active memory regions like code, Static Data Sections (both initialized and uninitialized), heap, as well as all the stacks, plus memory required to hold any additional data structures, such as Symbol Tables , Constant Tables , Debugging Structures , open files, etc, that the program ever needs while executing and will be loaded at least once during the entire run. Larger programs lave larger memory footprints. Programs themselves often do not contribute the largest portions to their own memory footprints; rather, structures introduced by the run-time environment take up most of the memory. For example, a C++ compiler inserts vtables, type_info objects and many temporary and anonymous objects that are active during a program's execution. In a Java program the memory footprint is predominantly made up of the runtime environment in form of the the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) itself that is loaded indirectly when a Java programs launches. During the 1990s, computer memory became cheaper and programs with larger memory footprints became commonplace. This trend has been mostly due to the widespread use of computer software, from large enterprise-wide applications that consume vast amounts of memory (such as databases), to memory intensive multimedia authoring and editing software. To tackle the ever increasing memory needs, Virtual Memory systems were introduced that divide the available memory into equally-sized portions and loads them from "pages" stored on the hard-disk on an as-and-when required basis. This approach to support programs with huge-memory-footprints has been quite successful. Most modern operating systems including Microsoft Windows , Apple's Mac OS X , and all versions of Linux and Unix provide Virtual memory systems. |
|
|