Memory Allocation/Deallocation Bottleneck?

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It’s significant, especially as fragmentation grows and the allocator has to hunt harder across larger heaps for the contiguous regions you request. Most performance-sensitive applications typically write their own fixed-size block allocators (eg, they ask the OS for memory 16MB at a time and then parcel it out in fixed blocks of 4kb, 16kb, etc) to avoid this issue.

In games I’ve seen calls to malloc()/free() consume as much as 15% of the CPU (in poorly written products), or with carefully written and optimized block allocators, as little as 5%. Given that a game has to have a consistent throughput of sixty hertz, having it stall for 500ms while a garbage collector runs occasionally isn’t practical.

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