[arghwhat]

If you have 32GB of free memory, then 20MB is insignificant. Installed RAM is not an interesting number.

I'm currently on a 16GB machine, where I only have a terminal, a text editor and a browser with few (<10) mild (wikipedia, hn, ...) tabs open. That gives 351 processes using a total of 8.7GB memory (2.11GB of which is unswappable, and about 1 gig of already compressed memory). My 3GB of disk caches go on top of that, and 0.5GB has already been swapped out.

I sure have room for a 20MB binary right now. However, on an 8GB system, I'd be in the red. I would already be swapping several GB, and any allocation would either evict (useful!) caches or swap out the memory of another process.

Any memory allocated in that state reduces the performance of some other component of the system.

Of course, 20MB is much better than the status-quo of casually burning a few hundred MB (or even a few GB) for simple tasks, and the situation of being out of memory with a whopping 8GB is caused primarily by the other "bad citizens", but the point here is that 20MB is indeed a quite big chunk of memory in real-world use-cases.