That could end up with significant false-positives when updating the thing without updating the estimated memory usage (especially if slow bounded fragmentation

That could end up with significant false-positives when updating the thing without updating the estimated memory usage (especially if slow bounded fragmentation over a long period of time applies). You might also have some expected ratio of memory usage (e.g. process B uses 3x the memory of process A), but want to allow the absolute usage to grow as more data is processed.