While what you say is true, this is not really a problem in practice; most of the time, the process doesn't have the amount of memory allocated to be a serious

While what you say is true, this is not really a problem in practice; most of the time, the process doesn't have the amount of memory allocated to be a serious problem, and the coredump file is written in a smart way [1]: usually, the address space has many 'gaps': instead of writing these all as \0 characters to disk, it uses more elaborate storage techniques. The end result is that you can have a coredump file which is reported to have a size of 1GB, while only having 100MB written on disk. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_dump#Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_dump#Format