[codys]

So that is true as long as all the bloat is contiguous. If it is spread out throughout the file (in such a way that bloat doesn't fill an entire page) it will still end up loaded. Or even if it is "unused", that doesn't mean something isn't scanning over it byte-by-byte.

In the happy case, yes, virtual memory will save us. But there are a lot of ways we could still end up loading the junk into ram.

Also, there are potential runtime costs to it being larger just on disk (need to seek over it, etc).