On the contrary: small objects mean that fragmentation is NOT a problem: because your small nodes can be "fit anywhere". Furthermore, if you've got 1000x 8-sized allocations, any of those "holes" can be repurposed for other 8-sized allocations.
Meaning: linked lists innately make most simple allocators more efficient.
Linked lists are a tradeoff between the difficulty of malloc/free (of which arrays are very difficult), and latency (of which linked lists have much higher latency).
A ton of 8-sized allocations is better on fragmentation than a 8-sized / 16-sized / 32-sized ... allocation pattern that most arary-allocators use.
Meaning: linked lists innately make most simple allocators more efficient.
Linked lists are a tradeoff between the difficulty of malloc/free (of which arrays are very difficult), and latency (of which linked lists have much higher latency).
A ton of 8-sized allocations is better on fragmentation than a 8-sized / 16-sized / 32-sized ... allocation pattern that most arary-allocators use.