I remember reading in a book on programming for computer games, sorry can't remember title. That an easy way to improve performance is do something like this near the start:

```
int main()
{
 {
   char dummy* = new char[10000000];  // 10Mbytes ish
   delete[] dummy;
 }
 ...
}

```

The idea is that the expensive part of dynamic memory allocation is the request to get memory from the OS, which doesn't normally get returned until the end of the program. Has anybody used this and seen performance improvements ?