In computer programming, resource management refers to techniques for managing resources (components with limited availability).
Computer programs may manage their own resources by using features exposed by programming languages (is a survey article contrasting different approaches), or may elect to manage them by a host – an operating system or virtual machine – or another program.
Host-based management is known as resource tracking, and consists of cleaning up resource leaks: terminating access to resources that have been acquired but not released after use. This is known as reclaiming resources, and is analogous to garbage collection for memory. On many systems, the operating system reclaims resources after the process makes the exit system call.
The omission of releasing a resource when a program has finished using it is known as a resource leak, and is an issue in sequential computing. Multiple processes wish to access a limited resource can be an issue in concurrent computing, and is known as resource contention.
Resource management seeks to control access in order to prevent both of these situations.
See main article: resource leak.
Formally, resource management (preventing resource leaks) consists of ensuring that a resource is released if and only if it is successfully acquired. This general problem can be abstracted as "before, body, and after" code, which normally are executed in this order, with the condition that the after code is called if and only if the before code successfully completes, regardless of whether the body code executes successfully or not. This is also known as execute around or a code sandwich, and occurs in various other contexts, such as a temporary change of program state, or tracing entry and exit into a subroutine. However, resource management is the most commonly cited application. In aspect-oriented programming, such execute around logic is a form of advice.
In the terminology of control flow analysis, resource release must postdominate successful resource acquisition; failure to ensure this is a bug, and a code path that violates this condition causes a resource leak. Resource leaks are often minor problems, generally not crashing the program, but instead causing some slowdown to the program or the overall system. However, they may cause crashes – either the program itself or other programs – due to resource exhaustion: if the system runs out of resources, acquisition requests fail. This can present a security bug if an attack can cause resource exhaustion. Resource leaks may happen under regular program flow – such as simply forgetting to release a resource – or only in exceptional circumstances, such as when a resource is not released if there is an exception in another part of the program. Resource leaks are very frequently caused by early exit from a subroutine, either by a return statement, or an exception raised either by the subroutine itself, or a deeper subroutine that it calls. While resource release due to return statements can be handled by carefully releasing within the subroutine before the return, exceptions cannot be handled without some additional language facility that guarantees that release code is executed.
More subtly, successful resource acquisition must dominate resource release, as otherwise the code will try to release a resource it has not acquired. The consequences of such an incorrect release range from being silently ignored to crashing the program or unpredictable behavior. These bugs generally manifest rarely, as they require resource allocation to first fail, which is generally an exceptional case. Further, the consequences may not be serious, as the program may already be crashing due to failure to acquire an essential resource. However, these can prevent recovery from the failure, or turn an orderly shutdown into a disorderly shutdown. This condition is generally ensured by first checking that the resource was successfully acquired before releasing it, either by having a boolean variable to record "successfully acquired" – which lacks atomicity if the resource is acquired but the flag variable fails to be updated, or conversely – or by the handle to the resource being a nullable type, where "null" indicates "not successfully acquired", which ensures atomicity.
See main article: resource contention.
In computer science, resource contention refers to a conflict that arises when multiple entities attempt to access a shared resource, like random access memory, disk storage, cache memory, internal buses, or external network devices.