I tripped over this video on the Slab allocator:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQVd9mZr-jI&t=840s

This is the original paper:

http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/bos94/full_papers/bonwick.ps

I read this paper a long time ago when I was working on a code base that had implemented its own version of Slab.…