Is tcmalloc better or worse than nedmalloc?
As you can see in the graph above, nedmalloc is about equal to tcmalloc for threadcache-only ops and substantially beats it for non-threadcache ops. nedmalloc is also written in C rather than C++ and v0.5 of tcmalloc only works on Unix systems and not win32. tcmalloc achieves its speed by never returning memory to the system – free space reclamation is one of the slowest parts of any allocator. Therefore tcmalloc should NOT be used outside long running server processes (and indeed its own docs say the same).
