Do threads have a distinct heap?

c windows linux multithreading stack
user188276 picture user188276 · Nov 3, 2009 · Viewed 62.7k times · Source

As far as I know each thread gets a distinct stack when the thread is created by the operating system. I wonder if each thread has a heap distinct to itself also?

Answer

brianegge picture brianegge · Nov 3, 2009

No. All threads share a common heap.

Each thread has a private stack, which it can quickly add and remove items from. This makes stack based memory fast, but if you use too much stack memory, as occurs in infinite recursion, you will get a stack overflow.

Since all threads share the same heap, access to the allocator/deallocator must be synchronized. There are various methods and libraries for avoiding allocator contention.

Some languages allow you to create private pools of memory, or individual heaps, which you can assign to a single thread.

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