Worst-case analysis of memory allocation algorithms

  • Authors:
  • M. R. Garey;R. L. Graham;J. D. Ullman

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • STOC '72 Proceedings of the fourth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
  • Year:
  • 1972

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Abstract

Various memory allocation problems can be modeled by the following abstract problem. Given a list A &equil; (&agr;1,&agr;2,...&agr;n,) of real numbers in the range (0, 1], place these in a minimum number of “bins” so that no bin holds numbers summing to more than 1. We let A* be the smallest number of bins into which the numbers of list A may be placed. Since a general placement algorithm for attaining A* appears to be impractical, it is important to determine good heuristic methods for assigning numbers of bins. We consider four such simple methods and analyze the worst-case performance of each, closely bounding the maximum of the ratio of the number of bins used by each method applied to list A to the optimal quantity A*.