I'm profiling code of a game I wrote and I'm wondering how it is possible that the following snippet causes an heap increase of 4kb (I'm profiling with Heapshot Analysis of Xcode) every time it is executed:

u8 WorldManager::versionOfMap(FILE *file)
{
  char magic[4];
  u8 version;

  fread(magic, 4, 1, file); <-- this is the line
  fread(&version,1,1,file);
  fseek(file, 0, SEEK_SET);

  return version;
}

According to the profiler the highlighted line allocates 4.00Kb of memory with a malloc every time the function is called, memory which is never released. This thing seems to happen with other calls to fread around the code, but this was the most eclatant one.

Is there anything trivial I'm missing? Is it something internal I shouldn't care about?

Just as a note: I'm profiling it on an iPhone and it's compiled as release (-O2).