Memory Allocation/Deallocation Bottleneck?

Question

How much of a bottleneck is memory allocation/deallocation in typical real-world programs? Answers from any type of program where performance typically matters are welcome.

Answer 1

Nearly every high performance application now has to use threads to exploit parallel computation. This is where the real memory allocation speed killer comes in when writing C/C++ applications.

In a C or C++ application, malloc/new must take a lock on the global heap for every operation. Even without contention locks are far from free and should be avoided as much as possible.

Java and C# are better at this because threading was designed in from the start and the memory allocators work from per-thread pools. This can be done in C/C++ as well, but it isn't automatic.