C Programming: malloc and free within a loop

Posted by kouei on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by kouei
Published on 2010-03-17T16:03:39Z Indexed on 2010/03/17 16:11 UTC
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I just started out with C and have very little knowledge about performance issues with malloc() and free(). My question is as such: if I were to call malloc() followed by free() in a while-loop that loops for, say, 20 times, would it run slower compared to if I were to call free() outside the loop?

I am actually using the first method to allocate memory to a buffer, read a string of variable length in a file, perform some string operation, and then clear the buffer after every iteration. If my method results in a lot of overhead then I'd like to ask for a better way for me to achieve the same results.

Sorry for my bad English.

Thanks and regards, K

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