Memory usage isn't decreasing when using free?

Question

Somehow this call to free() is not working. I ran this application on Windows and followed the memory using in Task Manager, but saw no reduction in memory usag

Answer 1

You can not assume that just after doing the free the memory will be returned back to OS. Generally the CRT implementation have some optimization because of which they may not return this memory immediately. This allows the CRT to allocate the subsequent memory allocation requests in a faster way.