Any thread-unsafe mallocs?

Question

I need a thread-unsafe, lockless malloc to use it in a single threaded application. I expect to gain a little performance boost because of this. I need it on win and linux, and it must guaranteed to be single-threaded. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Have you actually profiled your code and shown that it's spending a significant portion of its time in malloc? I would say instead of a replacement malloc, first consider an alternate algorithm that doesn't do as much dynamic allocation. If that's not an option I would consider a memory pool approach (they can be very fast with fixed-size blocks).

Answer 2

To answer the question, some implementations have compiler options to remove the thread safety from malloc. This answer: Is malloc thread-safe? suggests that NO_THREADS can be defined to remove the thread-safety from malloc, but I have not tested this.

You should listen to the other posts, however, it is unlikely to be the best place to start your optimisiations.