Memory management

Memory is one of the essential resources of a computer, and it's essential to manage it properly. Failure to do so can lead to slow performance and bugs such as arithmetic overflow, memory leaks, segmentation faults, and buffer overflows.

The primary purpose of a memory management system is to provide the ability to dynamically allocate the requested size of memory to programs and to release it for reuse when no longer needed. These systems perform management on two levels:

• Operating-system level
• Application level

We'll concentrate on the application level because it's the responsibility of an application software developer. The operating-system level is managed with an operating system.

There are two types of application-level management systems:

• Automatic memory management
• Manual memory management

Manual memory management assumes that the programmer uses manual instructions to release unused garbage. It's relevant to languages (still in wide use today) such as C and C++. The JVM has automatic memory management that involves the garbage collection.