A Nearly Quadratic Improvement for Memory Reallocation
Abstract
In the Memory Reallocation Problem a set of items of various sizes must be dynamically assigned to non-overlapping contiguous chunks of memory. It is guaranteed that the sum of the sizes of all items present at any time is at most a $(1-\varepsilon)$-fraction of the total size of memory (i.e., the load-factor is at most $1-\varepsilon$). The allocator receives insert and delete requests online, and can re-arrange existing items to handle the requests, but at a reallocation cost defined to be the sum of the sizes of items moved divided by the size of the item being inserted/deleted. The folklore algorithm for Memory Reallocation achieves a cost of $O(\varepsilon^{-1})$ per update. In recent work at FOCS'23, Kuszmaul showed that, in the special case where each item is promised to be smaller than an $\varepsilon^4$-fraction of memory, it is possible to achieve expected update cost $O(\log\varepsilon^{-1})$. Kuszmaul conjectures, however, that for larger items the folklore algorithm is optimal. In this work we disprove Kuszmaul's conjecture, giving an allocator that achieves expected update cost $O(\varepsilon^{-1/2} \operatorname*{polylog} \varepsilon^{-1})$ on any input sequence. We also give the first non-trivial lower bound for the Memory Reallocation Problem: we demonstrate an input sequence on which any resizable allocator (even offline) must incur amortized update cost at least $\Omega(\log\varepsilon^{-1})$. Finally, we analyze the Memory Reallocation Problem on a stochastic sequence of inserts and deletes, with random sizes in $[\delta, 2 \delta]$ for some $\delta$. We show that, in this simplified setting, it is possible to achieve $O(\log\varepsilon^{-1})$ expected update cost, even in the ``large item'' parameter regime ($\delta > \varepsilon^4$).
- Publication:
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arXiv e-prints
- Pub Date:
- May 2024
- DOI:
- 10.48550/arXiv.2405.12152
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2405.12152
- Bibcode:
- 2024arXiv240512152F
- Keywords:
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- Computer Science - Data Structures and Algorithms
- E-Print:
- In Proceedings of the 36th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA'24)