It's really important to realize that although we figured out that 4 MB of RAM is the maximum we can get at one shot, it definitely doesn't mean that you will always get that much. No, of course not. It completely depends upon the amount of free memory present within the particular freelist at the time of the memory request. Think about it: what if you are running on a Linux system that has been up for several days (or weeks). The likelihood of finding physically contiguous 4 MB chunks of free RAM is quite low (again, this depends upon the amount of RAM on the system and its workload).
As a rule of thumb, if the preceding experiment did not yield a maximum allocation of what we have deemed to be the maximum size (that is, 4 MB), why not try it on a freshly booted guest system? Now, the chances of having physically contiguous 4 MB chunks of free RAM are a lot better. Unsure about this? Let's get empirical...
