I'm on Windows 7 Professional x86.
I'm working with some proprietary files that are relatively large in size (~900 MB compressed, 1.5 GB uncompressed).
This program is also proprietary and the only one that will work with the file format that I'm trying to use, so I can't really choose anything else. It's a .NET application if that makes any difference.
Now here's the problem: the way the program works is very poor. It loads the compressed file, and keeps a handle on it. Then uncompresses it and keeps that in application memory. Then if I want to save the changes I've made, I have to save a new copy of the file, which requires compressing it and saving to disk.
Saving the file is the problem here - I basically have an application trying to store 3 or 4 copies of this humungous 1.5 GB file in memory, and only 4 GB of RAM on my system. As a result, it crashes about 1/4 of the way through the saving process with System Out of Memory exception.
- Increasing the size of the page file hasn't changed anything, though I will admit I am not too keen on how paging files work.
- I don't have access to any machines with more RAM to perform the operation.
- I'm on a laptop (which will be replaced in the coming months) so I don't want to buy/install more RAM.
- I don't really want to reformat to x64, and I'm not sure if that would help anything given that I only have 4 GB of RAM.
Speed is not an issue here; I just want the thing to have enough memory to complete successfully.
Note that I have no idea what the problem actually is. I don't know if it's because I don't have enough RAM, or because Windows only gives applications a limited amount of memory, or because my page file is too small or anything.
Does anybody have any ideas on what the problem may be and how I can alleviate it?
