memory holes

Noun

memory hole (plural memory holes)

1. A figurative place to which information is deliberately sent to be forgotten, or to which forgotten or lost information ends up; nowhere, oblivion.
   • As relations between the West and Russia grew worse, the party began to discard its patriotic draperies; everything that had been said during the war years was now quietly dropped into the memory hole.1957, Irving Howe, Lewis Coser, with the assistance of Julius Jacobson, “The Cold War: Repression and Collapse”, in The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919–1957), Boston, Mass.: Beacon...

   Synonyms:

   bit bucket, /dev/null

2. A fragment of physical address space which does not map to main memory.
   • A memory hole provides performance improvement by reserving certain parts of memory for use by ISA cards. […] The memory hole is usually disabled because there are few ISA cards today that need to be mapped. If you have an ISA card that refuses to function properly in a PC with more than 16MB of...1997, Stephen J. Bigelow, “System Questions”, in PC Hardware FAT FAQs: Troubleshooting, Upgrading, Maintaining, and Repairing, New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, →ISBN, pages 11–12
3. (rare) Synonym of memory leak (“any of several faults in the memory allocation logic of a computer or program whereby parts of memory become hidden or unusable”).
   • The use of new and delete, along with the scope related creation and deletion of objects, provide safer and more consistent management of the available memory pool. […] It also resolves common problems with passing incorrect pointers to free, or obtaining memory using malloc and then forgetting to...1992 September 9, Andrew McRae, “C++ in an Embedded Environment”, in AUUG 1992 Conference & Exhibition: Maintaining Control in an Open World: World Congress Centre, Melbourne, Australia, 8–11...

   Synonyms:

   memory leak