Savedmemory

Savedmemory is a computing concept and, in some contexts, the name of software libraries or systems that capture the in-memory state of a running program for persistence. The central goal is to enable a program to resume from a previously saved state after a shutdown, crash, or migration.

A savedmemory system typically operates by tracing memory objects reachable from program roots, serializing them into a stable representation, and writing this representation to non-volatile storage. It may support full snapshots and incremental or delta checkpoints to reduce I/O and storage costs. Robust implementations optimize for speed, memory safety, and cross-platform compatibility.

Key components often include a memory tracer or heap walker, a serializer, a storage backend, and a restoration engine. Consistency guarantees may vary, with crash-consistency ensured through write-ahead logs, atomic writes, or transactional backends.

Common use cases include crash recovery for long computations, live migration of processes in distributed settings, application hibernation and resume, and stateful backup for critical services.

The term is used in academic literature and in several open-source projects, but there is no widely adopted standard. Variants differ in whether they capture the entire heap, just root-reachable objects, or allow multi-version checkpoints.

For related topics, see checkpointing, snapshotting, persistence and memory dumps.