The object pool pattern is a software creational design pattern that uses a set of initialized objects kept ready to use – a "pool" – rather than allocating and destroying them on demand.
The object pool pattern is a software creational design pattern that uses a set of initialized objects kept ready to use – a "pool" – rather than allocating and destroying them on demand. A client of the pool will request an object from the pool and perform operations on the returned object. When the client has finished, it returns the object to the pool rather than destroying it; this can be done manually or automatically.
Object pools are primarily used for performance: in some circumstances, object pools significantly improve performance. Object pools complicate object lifetime, as objects obtained from and return to a pool are not actually created or destroyed at this time, and thus require care in implementation.
Object pooling can offer a significant performance boost in situations where the cost of initializing a class instance is high and the rate of instantiation and destruction of a class is high – in this case objects can frequently be reused, and each reuse saves a significant amount of time. Object pooling requires resources – memory and possibly other resources, such as network sockets, and thus it is preferable that the number of instances in use at any one time is low, but this is not required.
