2. Combine many small allocations into a smaller number of larger allocations

Small allocations can disproportionately reduce available free space. Not only does the allocator have a fixed overhead per allocation, regardless of size, but small allocations tend to break up large areas of free space into smaller pieces.

The ability to load a subregion of a VBO or texture map, and the ability to render that subregion independently, makes it possible to combine VBOs and textures together. For textures, a large texture can be used to hold a grid of smaller images. For VBOs, multiple vertex arrays can be combined end to end into a larger one. Besides reducing fragmentation, combining related images into a single texture, and related vertex arrays into a single VBO often improves rendering time, since it reduces the number of glBindBuffer or glBindTexture calls required to render a set of related objects.