In the previous post I wrote about the resource pool implementation offered by the DigitalRune Helper library. In this post I will show the pattern we use to make objects reusable.
When we start to design a class library we usually don’t care about resource pooling. Only when the major parts of the API and the internal algorithms are done we start to measure performance and profile memory usage. When we started optimizing DigitalRune Geometry and Physics we realized that some objects needed to be pooled in order to avoid garbage on the Xbox 360. So a few types had to be made reusable.
The following pattern has proven very handy for turning a normal object into a pooled object.
By now, we probably all know that the latency of the garbage collector on Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7 can be a problem. One solution is to avoid frequent memory allocations by using resource pools (or free-lists).
This blog post provides some information about the resource pool implementation provided by the DigitalRune libraries.
A collection of the most useful blog articles can be found here:
Article Collection (on Documentation page)
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