Performance Issues

We are confident that SmartHeap significantly out-performs most heap managers. We have benchtests that demonstrate this, and we offer the benchtest source for download so users can run the tests themselves. If you have your own benchtest program for evaluating heap managers, please read this. If you are not seeing any performance improvement in an app linked with SmartHeap, we would recommend generating a map file to verify that SmartHeap is indeed properly linked in. A properly linked EXE/DLL will have the symbol "SmartHeap_malloc" in its map file. For tips on how best to link your Win32 app to SmartHeap, please see our Knowledge Base article on linking.

That being said, performance improvements in a specific app are dependent on:

  1. How intensively the app exercises heap memory management. (If mem management isn't a performance bottleneck for your app, then one mem manager may appear to do as well as another.)
  2. The amount of memory available on the machine at runtime.
SmartHeap will improve performance most when the app is memory management intensive and the machine is tight on RAM relative to the app's footprint. We would recommend that performance tests be conducted on target end-user configurations rather than on fast 64M+ development machines.

Some other considerations: