Excuse me if I have mis-read your sample program but it looks like you are allocating 16 bytes, then immediately freeing it, again and again in a loop. Since yo

Excuse me if I have mis-read your sample program but it looks like you are allocating 16 bytes, then immediately freeing it, again and again in a loop. Since you're not allocating anything else, the allocate and free will happen almost immediately. Malloc() has a run time that can vary a lot depending on what has already been allocated & freed in the past, so this test is not meaningful. Not only that, but the original doug lea's malloc has a bin specifically for 16 byte allocations: http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/html/malloc.html http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/html/malloc.html (the smallest size), so you've specifically chosen a very fast example. In order to properly test malloc() you have to pre-generate some pseudo random numbers for your allocation sizes, and allocate and free unpredictably. But it's more complicated than that, as in the very occasional case when malloc() has to ask the OS for more heap, that system call may not "finish" until your program first writes to that region of memory... (ie malloc() returns but hasn't finished!)