title: How to avoid heap fragmentation?
body: <p>I'm currently working on a project for medical image processing, that needs a huge amount of memory. Is there anything I can do to avoid heap fragmentation and to speed up access of image data that has already been loaded into memory?</p>
  
  <p>The application has been written in C++ and runs on Windows XP.</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong> The application does some preprocessing with the image data, like reformatting, calculating look-up-tables, extracting sub images of interest ... The application needs about 2 GB RAM during processing, of which about 1,5 GB may be used for the image data.</p>