[wtarreau]

Absolutely. Sometimes when using OpenSSL in performance tests, you notice that performances vary significantly just by switching to a different memory allocator, which is totally scary.

I hadn't seen the conversation above, thanks for the pointer. It's surrealistic. I don't see how having to support multiple file formats requires to invest so many allocations. In the worst case you open the file (1 malloc and occasionally a few realloc) and you try to parse it into a struct using a few different decoders. I hope they're not allocating one byte at a time when reading a file...