!!Con West 2020 - Jordan Hendricks: Tex-Mex and malloc(3C): Restaurant Hosts and Memory Allocators!

Presented at !!Con West 2020: http://bangbangcon.com/west Before my life as a systems engineer, I worked for years as a hostess at an extremely popular Oklahoman Tex-Mex restaurant, whose wait list would routinely top 20-40 parties in length and 1-2 hour wait times. The host staff had a challenging task: seat waiting parties efficiently as other customers left, while keeping hangry customers happy and efficiency-obsessed managers off of our backs. Adding to our worries, the restaurant management would never turn a party away based on size, creating puzzles for the hosts: Where does one seat large parties – for instance, a group of 10 – when the largest table in the restaurant only holds 4 people? A clue: This problem looks a lot like the problems that memory allocators like malloc(3C) solve! In this talk, I will explore some parallels between my job as a hostess, where I decided how to seat people given a set of restaurant tables and a wait list, and implementing a memory allocator, which chooses how to give out pieces of a larger region of memory to requesting programs. We will explore questions like: What does fragmentation look like in a restaurant? What are heuristics we can use to estimate when a table will be free? Do all relevant stakeholders – customers, managers, host staff, servers – equally benefit from the same allocation strategies? #bangbangcon #bangbangconwest #bangbangconwest2020