It could be more than that. On Linux it would be bounded by your physical memory plus the swap partition. On Windows, the pagefile can automatically resize, so you might be able to allocate the entire free space of your hard drive of the windows partition.Originally Posted by Elysia
Of course at that point you're accessing at hard-drive speeds, so you'd be better off using file IO directly or a database.
Long before that, for sufficiently large containers, continuous memory can be inefficient, so std::deque can be used. If you need random access with long strings, this might be viable.
