I believe that if you malloc/free so much that those 120 cycles become a major issue, then perhaps doing dynamic allocation in this context isn't a good idea.

I believe that if you malloc/free so much that those 120 cycles become a major issue, then perhaps doing dynamic allocation in this context isn't a good idea. Furthermore, with Alexandrescu's solution, I'm not so sure that the 120 cycles that you gain here are not burned over there because your allocator has to construct a two-members structure and your program has to go through an extra indirection to access the actual memory block.