Yes I'm aware of how the algorithm works. I also know that if I allocated 500 MiB at the beginning of the program expecting my memory usage to be roughly that s

Yes I'm aware of how the algorithm works. I also know that if I allocated 500 MiB at the beginning of the program expecting my memory usage to be roughly that size, and my prediction was off by 50 MiB maybe I don't want to go hunting for another 500 MiB of space before my program ends or I stop using the buffer and free it. But your point about the virtual memory makes that moot anyways. Thank god for modern OSes. I've clearly been spending too much time around microcontrollers.