Efficient memory management?

I have created a library an C, and an equivalent i C# (for the .NET platform). To my surprise, the C# version is faster!

I have tracked this strange behavior to memory allocation, which for some reason is much faster in C#.

I have made some optimizations which reduced number of calls to malloc() in my C code, and that helped. But I am convinced that a further improvement is possible if malloc() could be replaced with a faster memory allocation method.

Does anybody know about a library for more efficient memory management than malloc() and free()? Or maybe an algorithm to somehow allocate in advance and realloc if needed?

In C++, you can use "new" and "delete". I don't know if they're more efficient or not, but from the descriptions of those operators, they seem like they would be.

you can use the API functions (read the MSDN for furthur info):
GlobalAlloc, VirtualAlloc/Ex, HeapAlloc...
that should probably help.

Please let us know about it.

My library is not only for windows, så I cannot use win32 specific API.

than you have a problem there huston

it is common knowledge that memory allocation takes relatively a lot of time.
it is a good advice to do that as few as you can

If memory allocation can be fast in .NET, then there must be some way to make it fast in C - I would guess that some kind of memory pooling could be used?