*BSD News Article 86487


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From: dantso@cris.com (Daniel Ts'o)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.lang.c,comp.sys.sun.apps
Subject: Alternative malloc ?
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 97 22:11:50 GMT
Organization: Concentric Internet Services
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:33827 comp.lang.c:184401 comp.sys.sun.apps:14689

	I am running a big program on FreeBSD 2.1. It is 66Mb and wants to 
grow a bit and malloc is failing. I presume that it is because, as I recall, 
the behavior of the BSD default malloc is to allocate in powers of two and the 
next step would be 130Mb, which is bigger than free swap at the moment.

	Can someone recommend an alternative malloc() that is fast (the 
program does a lot of malloc() calls, it is an interactive interpreted 
language), and yet does not have this power of two behavior ?

	Thanks.

		Cheers,
		Dan Ts'o
		dantso@cris.com