Determine size of dynamically allocated memory in C

Everyone telling you it's impossible is technically correct (the best kind of correct).

For engineering reasons, it is a bad idea to rely on the malloc subsystem to tell you the size of an allocated block accurately. To convince yourself of this, imagine that you were writing a large application, with several different memory allocators — maybe you use raw libc malloc in one part, but C++ operator new in another part, and then some specific Windows API in yet another part. So you've got all kinds of void* flying around. Writing a function that can work on any of these void*s impossible, unless you can somehow tell from the pointer's value which of your heaps it came from.

So you might want to wrap up each pointer in your program with some convention that indicates where the pointer came from (and where it needs to be returned to). For example, in C++ we call that std::unique_ptr<void> (for pointers that need to be operator delete'd) or std::unique_ptr<void, D> (for pointers that need to be returned via some other mechanism D). You could do the same kind of thing in C if you wanted to. And once you're wrapping up pointers in bigger safer objects anyway, it's just a small step to struct SizedPtr { void *ptr; size_t size; } and then you never need to worry about the size of an allocation again.

However.

There are also good reasons why you might legitimately want to know the actual underlying size of an allocation. For example, maybe you're writing a profiling tool for your app that will report the actual amount of memory used by each subsystem, not just the amount of memory that the programmer thought he was using. If each of your 10-byte allocations is secretly using 16 bytes under the hood, that's good to know! (Of course there will be other overhead as well, which you're not measuring this way. But there are yet other tools for that job.) Or maybe you're just investigating the behavior of realloc on your platform. Or maybe you'd like to "round up" the capacity of a growing allocation to avoid premature reallocations in the future. Example:

SizedPtr round_up(void *p) {
    size_t sz = portable_ish_malloced_size(p);
    void *q = realloc(p, sz);  // for sanitizer-cleanliness
    assert(q != NULL && portable_ish_malloced_size(q) == sz);
    return (SizedPtr){q, sz};
}
bool reserve(VectorOfChar *v, size_t newcap) {
    if (v->sizedptr.size >= newcap) return true;
    char *newdata = realloc(v->sizedptr.ptr, newcap);
    if (newdata == NULL) return false;
    v->sizedptr = round_up(newdata);
    return true;
}

To get the size of the allocation behind a non-null pointer which has been returned directly from libc malloc — not from a custom heap, and not pointing into the middle of an object — you can use the following OS-specific APIs, which I have bundled up into a "portable-ish" wrapper function for convenience. If you find a common system where this code doesn't work, please leave a comment and I'll try to fix it!

#if defined(__linux__)
// https://linux.die.net/man/3/malloc_usable_size
#include <malloc.h>
size_t portable_ish_malloced_size(const void *p) {
    return malloc_usable_size((void*)p);
}
#elif defined(__APPLE__)
// https://www.unix.com/man-page/osx/3/malloc_size/
#include <malloc/malloc.h>
size_t portable_ish_malloced_size(const void *p) {
    return malloc_size(p);
}
#elif defined(_WIN32)
// https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-runtime-library/reference/msize
#include <malloc.h>
size_t portable_ish_malloced_size(const void *p) {
    return _msize((void *)p);
}
#else
#error "oops, I don't know this system"
#endif

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>  // for malloc itself

int main() {
    void *p = malloc(42);
    size_t true_length = portable_ish_malloced_size(p);
    printf("%zu\n", true_length);
}

Tested on:

• Visual Studio, Win64 — _msize
• GCC/Clang, glibc, Linux — malloc_usable_size
• Clang, libc, Mac OS X — malloc_size
• Clang, jemalloc, Mac OS X — works in practice but I wouldn't trust it (silently mixes jemalloc's malloc and the native libc's malloc_size)
• Should work fine with jemalloc on Linux
• Should work fine with dlmalloc on Linux if compiled without USE_DL_PREFIX
• Should work fine with tcmalloc everywhere

Quuxplusone wrote: "Writing a function that can work on any of these void*s impossible, unless you can somehow tell from the pointer's value which of your heaps it came from." Determine size of dynamically allocated memory in C"

Actually in Windows _msize gives you the allocated memory size from the value of the pointer. If there is no allocated memory at the address an error is thrown.

int main()
{
    char* ptr1 = NULL, * ptr2 = NULL;
    size_t bsz;    
    ptr1 = (char*)malloc(10);
    ptr2 = ptr1;
    bsz = _msize(ptr2);
    ptr1++;
    //bsz = _msize(ptr1);   /* error */
    free(ptr2);

    return 0;
}

Thanks for the #define collection. Here is the macro version.

#define MALLOC(bsz) malloc(bsz)
#define FREE(ptr) do { free(ptr); ptr = NULL; } while(0)
#ifdef __linux__
#include <malloc.h>
#define MSIZE(ptr) malloc_usable_size((void*)ptr)
#elif defined __APPLE__
#include <malloc/malloc.h>
#define MSIZE(ptr) malloc_size(const void *ptr)
#elif defined _WIN32
#include <malloc.h>
#define MSIZE(ptr) _msize(ptr)
#else
#error "unknown system"
#endif

Note: using _msize only works for memory allocated with calloc, malloc, etc. As stated on the Microsoft Documentation

The _msize function returns the size, in bytes, of the memory block allocated by a call to calloc, malloc, or realloc.

And will throw an exception otherwise.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-runtime-library/reference/msize?view=vs-2019

I was struggling recently with visualizing the memory that was available to write to (i.e using strcat or strcpy type functions immediately after malloc).

This is not meant to be a very technical answer, but it could help you while debugging, as much as it helped me.

You can use the size you mallocd in a memset, set an arbitrary value for the second parameter (so you can recognize it) and use the pointer that you obtained from malloc.

Like so:

char* my_string = (char*) malloc(custom_size * sizeof(char));
if(my_string) { memset(my_string, 1, custom_size); }

You can then visualize in the debugger how your allocated memory looks like: