Suppose the information did happen to search through the free blocks. Suppose you put them into an array instead of a linked list. They can't actually be in the array, you see? The blocks are in the pool heap wherever they happen to be. So the array has to point to them. As you walk through the array you have to do reference the pointers. The only way it's better is that they are not dependent loads. But you have this array to manage now.