What Is a Memory Pool?
A memory pool is an allocator that reserves a large block of memory upfront and serves many small allocations from it, typically as fixed-size slots. Freeing returns a slot to the pool for reuse rather than back to the system allocator. This avoids the overhead and fragmentation of frequent general-purpose allocations.
Why it matters
Pools make allocation fast and predictable for workloads that churn through many similar objects, which matters in hot paths and real-time systems. The cost is reserving memory ahead of time and managing the pool lifecycle.
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