BrowserUk:

Yeah, it can consume more memory. I always had a paragraph at the beginning, but the marker at the end was "free" roughly 1/4 of the time, since the allocator had to round up to the next paragraph anyway (MSVC 6.0, I don't know if it has the same strategy/constraints in newer versions).

I really like the idea of two interleaved free chains to aid in detection. I noticed that in the applications I worked on, that allocation usually happened in just a few particular sizes, so allocating two blocks at a time (both of the same size) and dropping the second one into a free list might be interesting. I'll have to remember this when I do my next fun C/++ job.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.