Cocoa provides for page-aligned memory areas that it calls Memory Zones, and provides a few memory management functions that take a zone as an argument.
Let's assume you need to allocate a block of memory (not for an object, but for arbitrary data). If you call malloc(size), the buffer will always be allocated in the default zone. However, somebody may have used allocWithZone: to allocate your object in another zone besides the default. In that case, it would seem better to use NSZoneMalloc([self zone], size), which keeps your buffer and owning object in the same area of memory.
Do you follow this practice? Have you ever made use of memory zones?
Update: I think there is a tendency on Stack Overflow to respond to questions about low-level topics with a lecture about premature optimization. I understand that zones probably mattered more in 1993 on NeXT hardware than they do today, and a Google search makes it pretty clear that virtually nobody is concerned with them. I am asking anyway, to see if somebody could describe a project where they made use of memory zones.
I've written software for NeXTStep, GNUstep on Linux and Cocoa on Mac OS X, and have never needed to use custom memory zones. The condition which would suggest it as a good improvement to the software has either never arisen, or never been detected as significant.