That's definitely very interesting. I do wonder if malloc and free would take longer if there would multiple threads in the program, which is more relevant to t

That's definitely very interesting. I do wonder if malloc and free would take longer if there would multiple threads in the program, which is more relevant to this discussion; surely exp would not, assuming sufficient free cores. Even more interesting would be if you malloced in one thread and freed in another, given that allocators usually make use of thread-local pools.