Why is memory allocation on heap MUCH slower than on stack?
I have been told this many times. But I don't know WHY...What extra cost is involved when allocating memory from heap? Is it hardware related? Is it related to CPU cycles? So many guesses but no exact answers...Could someone give me some elaboration?
Just as "unwind" said, the Heap data structure is more complicated than Stack. And In my opinion, some memory space is allocated to a thread as its Stack when it starts to run, while the heap is shared by all the threads within a process. This paradigm require some extra mechanism to manage each thread's usage of the shared heap, such as Garbage Collection. Am I right on this?
Answer
Because the heap is a far more complicated data structure than the stack.
For many architectures, allocating memory on the stack is just a matter of changing the stack pointer, i.e. it's one instruction. Allocating memory on the heap involves looking for a big enough block, splitting it, and managing the "book-keeping" that allows things like free() in a different order.
Memory allocated on the stack is guaranteed to be deallocated when the scope (typically the function) exits, and it's not possible to deallocate just some of it.