The idea is to avoid memory allocation when only one segment step is to be allocated.
This gives some speedup which is difficult to measure on this trashcan from hell, but
it's about from 7% to 10% in the extreme case with single volume filling the whole of
the viewport. This seems to depends on the phase of the bug-o-meter in the studio.
On the linux boxes it's not that spectacular speedup, it's about 2% on my laptop and
about 3% on the studio desktop. This is likely because of the awesomeness of jemalloc.