[fpc-pascal] TFPList.Expand was: Maximum of memory which can be used by single program in 32 bit Windows

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, LacaK said:
> As new nodes are appended TFPList.Expand is called
> And there is:
>    if FCapacity > 127 then Inc(IncSize, FCapacity shr 2);
> 
> So if I have in list 1 000 000 items, then at once list is expanded by 
> 250 000, which causes in one step out of memory
> So my question is: can I somehow control increment count ? I think that 
> ATM no.
> So second question is can TFPList.Expand be modified, that for large 
> FCapacity will be used smaller increment ? :-)

TMemoryStream also has this behaviour, and indeed I override it in my own
applications to let the growth taper off after 128MB.  If you have a lot of
midsized memory streams, it otherwise results in having 25%/2 = 12.5%
unused memory lieing around.

But of course all datastructures based on a single array (and thus inviting
very large block allocations) are fundamentally flawed because of it in the
first place.