12th December 2022, 1 min read

What is the memory usage of a small array in C++?

In an earlier blog post, I reported that the memory usage of a small byte array in Java (e.g., an array containing 4 bytes) was about 24 bytes. In other words: allocating small blocks of memory has substantial overhead.

What happens in C++?

To find out, I can try to allocate one million 4-byte arrays and look at the total memory usage of the process. Of course, the memory usage of the process will include some overhead unrelated to the 4-byte arrays, but we expect that such overhead will be relatively small.

From my benchmark, I get the following results…

The results will vary depending on the configuration of your system, on your optimization level, and so forth.

But the lesson is that allocating four bytes (new char[4] or malloc(4)) does not use four bytes of memory… it will generally use much more.