fullsizeofever

Fullsizeofever is a term used in theoretical discussions of computer memory management to denote the maximum amount of memory that could be allocated and retained by a program or system under a given model. It is not a concrete function in programming languages but a thought-experiment or metric used to reason about growth, leaks, fragmentation, and addressing limits.

Originating in online programming forums and hobbyist literature in the late 2000s and early 2010s, the term has appeared in discussions about allocator design, compiler analyses, and garbage-collection strategies.

Interpretations vary: in some accounts, fullsizeofever refers to the supremum of live allocations at any point in time under a specified allocator model; in others, it denotes the cumulative total of all allocations over the lifetime of a program or system. In both senses, it requires explicit assumptions about object lifetimes, reuse of memory, and the behavior of the allocator.

Examples illustrate its use as a bounding thought experiment rather than a precise measurement. In a fixed-size heap with a particular collector, fullsizeofever would be bounded by the available heap plus metadata; in a hypothetical unbounded model, it could grow without theoretical limit, highlighting the difference between theoretical memory capacity and practical constraints.

Critics note that fullsizeofever is ill-posed without a clear model and that real systems employ constraints like virtual memory, paging, and fragmentation. As a teaching tool, it helps discuss worst-case memory behavior, overflow risks, and the gap between memory models and actual implementations.

See also: memory management, allocators, garbage collection, fragmentation, address space.