> While it usually performed better than the memory mapped files performance suffered as the content grew past the limitations imposed by physical memory. Phys

> While it usually performed better than the memory mapped files performance suffered as the content grew past the limitations imposed by physical memory. Physical memory is RAM memory. Their initial observation was: 1) If you need less memory than you have RAM installed - use malloc. Faster than file-backed mmap(). 2) If you need more memory than you have RAM installed - use file-backed mmap(). Faster than malloc() + swap. Edit: you can even see this on the graph in the article. Around time 0 it is malloc that is faster than file, then malloc sinks and file gets faster.