Tomem

Tomem is a hypothetical memory-management concept used in computer science discourse to illustrate time-aware allocation and reclamation. The central idea is to extend traditional allocators with visibility into the temporal lifetime of objects, allowing memory to be partitioned into regions that can be allocated, kept warm in caches, or reclaimed at predictable times. In a tomem-style system, a lifetimes tracker records predicted or observed lifetimes for allocated objects. A time-aware allocator places objects into pools corresponding to expected lifetimes, enabling bulk reclamation and reducing fragmentation. A reclamation engine coordinates when regions are freed, using both explicit release events and predicted stale lifetimes. Optional prefetch hints and allocator-aware memory layouts aim to improve cache and NUMA locality.

There are potential advantages: lower fragmentation, improved cache locality, and more predictable latency in real-time contexts. It also introduces overhead from tracking lifetimes and potential mispredictions, which can negate benefits. The approach remains primarily theoretical and educational rather than standardized in practice.

Variants and usage: Some discussions describe Static tomem, where lifetime information is supplied by the programmer, and Dynamic tomem, where lifetimes are inferred at runtime. Deploying tomem-like strategies requires careful integration with the language runtime, the operating system's memory manager, and hardware characteristics.

See also: memory allocator, arena allocation, garbage collection, temporal locality.