I used to think this. Then I deployed on windows. Virtual memory can’t exceed total physical memory (+pagefile) or else malloc() will fail. I am currently having an issue where memory is “allocated” but not used causing software crashes. Actual used memory is 60% of that.
The page file in Windows can grow and the max size, I believe, is 3 times the amount of physical memory in the machine. So, if you're trying to commit more than [Physical Memory x 4] bytes, then yes, it will fail. But, more than likely, you'll get malloc failures long before that due to address space fragmentation (unless you're doing one huge chunk).
