Determine size of dynamically allocated memory in C

Question

Is there a way in C to find out the size of dynamically allocated memory?

For example, after

char* p = malloc (100);

Is there

Answer 1

Everyone telling you it's impossible is technically correct (the best kind of correct).

For engineering reasons, it is a bad idea to rely on the malloc subsystem to tell you the size of an allocated block accurately. To convince yourself of this, imagine that you were writing a large application, with several different memory allocators — maybe you use raw libc malloc in one part, but C++ operator new in another part, and then some specific Windows API in yet another part. So you've got all kinds of void* flying around. Writing a function that can work on any of these void*s impossible, unless you can somehow tell from the pointer's value which of your heaps it came from.

So you might want to wrap up each pointer in your program with some convention that indicates where the pointer came from (and where it needs to be returned to). For example, in C++ we call that std::unique_ptr (for pointers that need to be operator delete'd) or std::unique_ptr (for pointers that need to be returned via some other mechanism D). You could do the same kind of thing in C if you wanted to. And once you're wrapping up pointers in bigger safer objects anyway, it's just a small step to struct SizedPtr { void *ptr; size_t size; } and then you never need to worry about the size of an allocation again.

However.

There are also good reasons why you might legitimately want to know the actual underlying size of an allocation. For example, maybe you're writing a profiling tool for your app that will report the actual amount of memory used by each subsystem, not just the amount of memory that the programmer thought he was using. If each of your 10-byte allocations is secretly using 16 bytes under the hood, that's good to know! (Of course there will be other overhead as well, which you're not measuring this way. But there are yet other tools for that job.) Or maybe you're just investigating the behavior of realloc on your platform. Or maybe you'd like to "round up" the capacity of a growing allocation to avoid premature reallocations in the future. Example:

SizedPtr round_up(void *p) {
    size_t sz = portable_ish_malloced_size(p);
    void *q = realloc(p, sz);  // for sanitizer-cleanliness
    assert(q != NULL && portable_ish_malloced_size(q) == sz);
    return (SizedPtr){q, sz};
}
bool reserve(VectorOfChar *v, size_t newcap) {
    if (v->sizedptr.size >= newcap) return true;
    char *newdata = realloc(v->sizedptr.ptr, newcap);
    if (newdata == NULL) return false;
    v->sizedptr = round_up(newdata);
    return true;
}

To get the size of the allocation behind a non-null pointer which has been returned directly from libc malloc — not from a custom heap, and not pointing into the middle of an object — you can use the following OS-specific APIs, which I have bundled up into a "portable-ish" wrapper function for convenience. If you find a common system where this code doesn't work, please leave a comment and I'll try to fix it!

#if defined(__linux__)
// https://linux.die.net/man/3/malloc_usable_size
#include 
size_t portable_ish_malloced_size(const void *p) {
    return malloc_usable_size((void*)p);
}
#elif defined(__APPLE__)
// https://www.unix.com/man-page/osx/3/malloc_size/
#include 
size_t portable_ish_malloced_size(const void *p) {
    return malloc_size(p);
}
#elif defined(_WIN32)
// https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-runtime-library/reference/msize
#include 
size_t portable_ish_malloced_size(const void *p) {
    return _msize((void *)p);
}
#else
#error "oops, I don't know this system"
#endif

#include 
#include   // for malloc itself

int main() {
    void *p = malloc(42);
    size_t true_length = portable_ish_malloced_size(p);
    printf("%zu\n", true_length);
}

Tested on:

• Visual Studio, Win64 — _msize
• GCC/Clang, glibc, Linux — malloc_usable_size
• Clang, libc, Mac OS X — malloc_size
• Clang, jemalloc, Mac OS X — works in practice but I wouldn't trust it (silently mixes jemalloc's malloc and the native libc's malloc_size)
• Should work fine with jemalloc on Linux
• Should work fine with dlmalloc on Linux if compiled without USE_DL_PREFIX
• Should work fine with tcmalloc everywhere