So, if Christian could run some tests where the allocations are reserved (quite literally for vector, but one would have to prepopulate other containers when using the standard allocator) and only *accesses* to those elements are measured.
Updated results for https://svn.boost.org/svn/boost/sandbox/monotonic/libs/monotonic/test/compar... are here http://tinyurl.com/m83vll for GCC and here http://tinyurl.com/n9g8jv for MSVC. TBB is faster than monotonic in one test on Win32, sort_list, which is intriguing. Monotonic also loses sort_list against boost::fast_pool by ~10%, but wins others by multiple orders of magnitude. Boost::pool and ::fast_pool also require explicit releasing of memory (*if* you can actually do this, see note earlier about problems with rebind<> and boost::fast/pool), so there is a strong case to be made for monotonic over these. It is true that TBB and std:: are both general allocators, and hence are doing much more work than monotonic. However, that is also why monotonic is generally faster than either. Caveat: Monotonic allocation was designed for small, short-lived containers and works best in that case. While it does indeed scale, you will eventually exhaust memory if you repeatedly resize a vector say, or continually add and remove elements from a container using a monotonic allocator. Regards, Christian.