Yesterday I stumbled upon this excellent research paper:
Reconsidering Custom Memory Allocation - (PDF:
http://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/berger-oopsla2002.pdf )
It got the "Most Influential OOPSLA Paper Award" in 2012.
Abstract (for those lazy to read it):
"Custom memory management is often used in systems software for
the purpose of decreasing the cost of allocation and tightly
controlling memory footprint of the software. Until 2002, it was
taken for granted that application-specific memory allocators
were superior to general purpose libraries. Berger, Zorn and
McKinley’s paper demonstrated through a rigorous empirical study
that this assumption is not well-founded, and gave insights into
the reasons why general purpose allocators can outperform
handcrafted ones. The paper also stands out for the quality of
its empirical methodology."
