No, compared to not doing so many allocations that freeing them is time consuming or expensive. Having allocations slow a program down means that there are way too many, probably due to being too granular and being in a hot loop. On top of that it means everything is a pointer and that lack of locality will slow things down even further. The difference between allocating many millions of objects and chasing their pointers and doing a single allocation of a vector and running through that can easily be 100x faster.