What is memory contention?

Answer 1

Memory contention is a state a OS memory manager can reside in when to many memory requests (alloc, realloc, free) are issued to it from an active application possibly leading to a DOS condition specific to that application. Memory contention is typically not caused by a memory overflow by all joined allocation requests but rather by the frequency of joined reallocation requests issued! Is is not about the joined memory size allocated but about the reallocation request queue size that overflows! A typical symptom of an application suffering memory contention and therefore not anymore being served memory management requests by the operating system, is that it unexpectedly shuts down without any form of notification.