I recently found this paper (around 100 pages) from Ulrich Drepper named "What every programmer should know about memory". It was very interesting and I red most of it in three days. It's not specifically about memory pools, but covers many performance aspects of memory and I learned a lot from it. Online-Version: http://lwn.net/Articles/250967/ PDF Download: http://lwn.net/Articles/259710/ I'm sure that improving memory efficiency can help us a lot to improve performance. However, I would first try to pick some spots where you can prove that memory is the bottleneck and then try to resolve the problems there. Just adding a whole memory pooling system for everything sounds like a lot of work with possibly little effect on performance. To cover everything, a solution has to be generic and the real problems might need more specific solutions.