Often, yes, you're better off just using the general purpose memory allocator. I think the replies to your comment are unfairly giving you a hard time. Modern

Often, yes, you're better off just using the general purpose memory allocator. I think the replies to your comment are unfairly giving you a hard time. Modern memory allocators are quite good. Before spending the time to roll your own allocation strategy, first do the experiments and analysis to convince yourself that memory allocation is even a performance problem. Once you've done that, do some work to implement a naive allocation strategy yourself and compare it against the standard allocator. If you're not outperforming it by a lot, work on it for a week. If after that week you're still not outperforming the standard allocator by a lot, just use the standard allocator. Yes, sometimes optimizing for your exact use case can yield performance benefits. Buuuuuut... the chances that your use case actually falls out of what the general allocators have been designed for is small. And the people implementing the general purpose allocators are really good. They've optimized things you're not even aware of yet. One random tidbit actually in favor of doing your own allocation: malloc and free are (in most compilers, I believe) always going to be function calls. Sometimes the benefit you get from rolling your own is just the benefit of eliminating a function call and inlining allocation code. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯