It is traditionally potentially very inefficient to not preallocate the memory,
but rely on reallocation every time you push something into vector.
For example, looking at unity build of RawSpeed
(-O3 -g0 -emit-llvm -Xclang -disable-llvm-optzns),
the memory story is as follows:
total runtime: 11.34s. calls to allocation functions: 2694053 (237612/s) temporary memory allocations: 645188 (56904/s) peak heap memory consumption: 231.36MB peak RSS (including heaptrack overhead): 397.39MB
Looking at details, FoldingSetNodeID::AddString() is noteworthy, frequently called and is allocation-heavy.
But it is quite obvious how many times we will push into Bits - we will push String.size() itself,
and then we will push once per every 4 bytes of String (padding last block).
And if we preallocate, we get:
total runtime: 11.20s. calls to allocation functions: 2594704 (231669/s) temporary memory allocations: 560004 (50000/s) peak heap memory consumption: 231.36MB peak RSS (including heaptrack overhead): 398.06MB
Which is a measurable win:
total runtime: -0.14s. # -1.23 % calls to allocation functions: -99349 (719920/s) # -3.69 % temporary memory allocations: -85184 (617275/s) # -13.2 % (!) peak heap memory consumption: 0B peak RSS (including heaptrack overhead): 0B total memory leaked: 0B
We have divideCeil in MathExtras.