I have found that a general pattern of setting up a memory arena or anything of that kind does help, especially of course if one anticipates more frequent / heavier usage of heap. Helps with performance (e.g.: faster allocations), memory fragmentation (which itself also helps with performance indirectly of course) and other things. Can be very simple.[1]

Or more complicated (if anticipating a lot of allocation work for very varying buffer sizes) - e.g. slab allocators. memcached is an example where this is used, a couple pictures explain the gist.[2]

[1]: note: can be even simpler of course, but quick example of structs used:

```

  typedef struct
      char *memory;
      size_t size;
      size_t used;
  } memory_arena_t;

  typedef struct {
      memory_arena_t *arenas;
      size_t arena_count;
      size_t max_arenas;
      size_t arena_size;
      size_t total_size;
      size_t total_used;
  } memory_allocator_t;

```

[2]: https://siemens.blog/posts/memcached-memory-model/ - I'm sure that when heap is visualised, it would show how this helps keeping fragmentation at bay as well (this helps wasting fewer memory pages, too).