The data wasn't too big to fit in memory, but rather defragmentation meant that the amount of free memory available was less than the amount of contiguous space

The data wasn't too big to fit in memory, but rather defragmentation meant that the amount of free memory available was less than the amount of contiguous space, which will be an issue in any dynamically allocating system that doesn't translate pointers. That said, bubble sort is only n^2 and computers are fast. The real solution was that defrag was an alternative to crashing, so it didn't matter how long it took. Calling it meant a bug report needed to be filed.