Using calloc could reduce this significantly since the kernel can lazily fill zero pages only when you access them.
> On Nov 24, 2014, at 3:01 PM, David Smith <[email protected]> wrote: > > To add some data to this conversation, I just timed allocating a billion > Int64s on my macbook, and I got this (I ran these multiple times before this > and got similar timings): > > julia> N=1_000_000_000 > 1000000000 > > julia> @time x = Array(Int64,N); > elapsed time: 0.022577671 seconds (8000000128 bytes allocated) > > julia> @time x = zeros(Int64,N); > elapsed time: 3.95432248 seconds (8000000152 bytes allocated) > > So we are talking adding possibly seconds to a program per large array > allocation. > > >
