Traditionally, in high performance systems, repeatedly allocating and deallocating memory has been found to be costly. (i.e a malloc vs free cycle). Hence, people resorted to building their own memory pool on top of the OS, dealing with fragmentation/free list maintenance etc. One of the popular techniques to doing this being Slab allocators . This post is about doing a reality check about the cost of explicitly doing an alloc() and free() cycle, given that most popular OS es, specifically Linux gotten better at memory allocation recently. Along the way, I will also compare the JVM memory allocations (which should be faster since we pay a premium for the freeing of memory via garbage collection). So, all set here we go. The following is a comparison of native c allocations, java jvm based allocation, java direct buffer allocation. For each of them we measure the following. Allocation/free rate (rate/s): This gives you an upper bound on the single threaded throughput of your