I think that’s been normal in malloc for some time. I maintain that we should all thank Java, and the hype train around it, for forcing operating systems to implement more robust threading support. Everyone wanted to be able to say they did Java well, and nearly every OS had capital ‘I’ Issues, including Solaris. Boy I bet those closed room arguments were epic.

Where GCed languages pulled ahead for a while, particularly Java, was that they had mature concurrent memory allocation before most OSes did, so many people found on early two and four core hardware that malloc started to show up as a bottleneck.