Poul-Henning Kamp compares two different ways of resizing a buffer (edited slightly):
for (;;) {if (buffer too small)
p = realloc(p, l += 80);
[...]
}
versus
for (;;) {if (buffer too small)
p = realloc(p, l *= 16);
[...]
}
p = realloc(p, strlen(p) + 1);
It's also worth pointing out that the second algorithm here is A LOT FASTER (for any value of 16; in practice, 16 is often equal to 2).
This is something that a lot of people miss; bumping the size by a constant results in quadratic amortized allocation time (because of the copying), where the second algorithm gives linear amortized allocation time.
If you don't know what that means, don't worry, just remember one thing: DO NOT use the first one. It's a bad idea, it doesn't scale, it should be fixed wherever you see it.
Tim
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