What is your favorite hand-rolled malloc?
jacquesm: I'm using jemalloc in places where we ran in to trouble with the regular malloc.It's been a long long time since I rolled my own, so I don't think I'm qualified to answer the rest of your questions except for the second, linked list of pointers of free(d) memory would be the best choice I think, with as an extra an array of such lists grouped by size. (I hope that makes sense...) to speed up the search for a block of the right size.