CPP Memory Management & Performance Optimization

Question 1

What is a memory leak in software applications?

Accepted Answer

Allocated memory that is never freed, causing the program to consume increasing amounts of RAM

Answer

Memory that is accessed too quickly

Answer

Memory shared between two processes

Answer

A CPU cache miss

Question 2

What is garbage collection in a managed runtime environment?

Accepted Answer

Automatic identification and freeing of memory no longer referenced by the application

Answer

Manual deallocation of heap memory by the programmer

Answer

Compressing unused disk space

Answer

Clearing CPU caches periodically

Question 3

What is the difference between stack and heap memory?

Accepted Answer

Stack memory is automatically managed and stores local variables; heap memory is dynamically allocated and manually managed

Answer

Stack is slower; heap is faster

Answer

Stack stores objects; heap stores primitives

Answer

They are two names for the same memory region

Question 4

What does 'Big O notation' measure in algorithm performance?

Accepted Answer

How an algorithm's runtime or space requirements grow relative to input size

Answer

Exact execution time in milliseconds

Answer

Memory address size

Answer

The number of CPU cores used

Question 5

What is CPU cache locality and why does it matter for performance?

Accepted Answer

Accessing data that is physically close in memory, improving cache hit rates and reducing access time

Answer

Storing data on the same CPU core to avoid network latency

Answer

Pinning threads to specific CPU cores

Answer

Preloading all application data at startup

Question 6

What is object pooling as a performance optimization technique?

Accepted Answer

Reusing a set of pre-allocated objects instead of repeatedly creating and destroying them

Answer

Sharing database connection strings

Answer

Pooling CPU threads into a fixed-size group

Answer

Combining small objects into one large object