Actually, there's often no cost at all to allocating a zeroed buffer. FreeBSD zeroes out free memory in its idle time and uses that for calloc(). Linux hands ou

Actually, there's often no cost at all to allocating a zeroed buffer. FreeBSD zeroes out free memory in its idle time and uses that for calloc(). Linux hands out a pointer to a shared read-only page of zero memory and then gives you "real" memory when you write to it. I suspect NT does something like Linux, but I don't think its precise [mc]alloc() implementation is documented.