[eru]

> That’s not the brightest idea: inflates disk bandwidth by at least a factor of 2.

Who cares for a word processor?

You are right, that you care for a database.

> The guy will be fine. The program might allocate a large buffer on startup but will only use the small initial slice because chromebooks don’t come with particularly large screens. Linux kernel does not automatically commit allocated memory.

That's just dynamic memory allocation in disguise via virtual memory.