Delphi-PRAXiS - FastMM4 large memory allocation

Earlier this week a long-time customer asked me why FastMM allocates large memory blocks from the top of the memory and if that option could safely be turned off. Their reasoning was that such allocations are much slower than normal ones. The question surprised me as I didn’t know of any such difference in speed so I did what I usually do–I wrote a benchmark application and measured it.

TL;DR Yes, allocating from the top is slower. No, the difference is not big and in most cases you’ll not even notice it.

There were, however, other interesting results that my simple benchmark pointed out. More on that in a moment, but first…

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