free() under Windows XP can be incredibly slow. I once created a big hash table with more than 10000 allocated hash buckets, and freeing it took around 3 second

free() under Windows XP can be incredibly slow. I once created a big hash table with more than 10000 allocated hash buckets, and freeing it took around 3 seconds (!) on a 3GHz P4. The same code on Linux and OSX took around 3 milliseconds.