Yeah, that'd be much better. It'd still only tell us how the allocator performed when having to share cache, memory B/W etc with Doom 3 though. Performance of similar allocations in a different application could be different. Even changing the screen resolution of Doom 3 might be enough to change the performance of the allocator. To get anywhere we need to understand what all the hardware components that alter performance are, the limits of their various resources and the penalties for running out of those resources. I normally find it is easier to remove the allocs from my program's main loop than to do this kind of analysis. In fact, I think this analysis is impossible. What happens when some background process like a virus checker decides to run? Doing less work in your program is almost always better. Moving the allocations out of the main loop normally makes the ownership easier to understand too, so helps to minimise code complexity.