Worst-case analysis of memory allocation algorithms

Abstract

Various memory allocation problems can be modeled by the following abstract problem. Given a list A = (&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*.