Application for memory allocation or usage?

[imported_KuJaX]

I have 8GB of memory in a Vista Ultimate 64 bit operating system environment. Excel tossed a "out of memory" in my face. Is there an application or some way of determining the maximum amount of allocation an application can received? I swear Excel 2007 could utilize my full 8GB of memory.

Any suggestions on figuring out why this happened? It isnt the first time. Whenever I work on multi-gigabyte sized Excel files it does it.

 

[Nothinman]

I don't think there's a 64-bit version of Office so the most it'll be able to use is 2G, 4G if it's marked LargeAddressAware but it won't be able to get anywhere near 8G.

 

[imported_KuJaX]

LargeAddressAware - What is that?

 

[aka1nas]

Did you turn off your page file?

 

[Nothinman]

LargeAddressAware - What is that?

It's a bit in the binary that says whether or not it can handle being given large virtual addresses.

 

[faxon]

yea a lot of old 32bit code got coded so even when 4gb of memory was present in a system, it wouldnt use more than 2gb so as to prevent it from crashing the system by eating up all the memory address space and starving the OS. it's the same idea as having to add the /3gb flag to your boot.ini in XP so so it will recognize more of your ram when you install more than 2gb and it doesnt recognize it all for some reason. in an era of $100 getting you 8gb of 1066 low voltage OCing memory though, it doesnt really make a whole lot of sense to skimp on memory. all my systems now have all memory slots populated, with none of them using less than 4GB.

 

[Nothinman]

yea a lot of old 32bit code got coded so even when 4gb of memory was present in a system, it wouldnt use more than 2gb so as to prevent it from crashing the system by eating up all the memory address space and starving the OS. i

No, the virtual address limit was 2G so lots of code just assumed they would never be handed an address over that.

it's the same idea as having to add the /3gb flag to your boot.ini in XP so so it will recognize more of your ram when you install more than 2gb and it doesnt recognize it all for some reason.

No, the /3G flag affects the virtual address layout but has no affect at all on the amount of physical memory that Windows will see.

 

[imported_KuJaX]

Okay, so how can I get Excel to access more than 2GB?

 

[Nothinman]

You can get something to mark it LargeAddressAware and see what happens. MS has a tool to do that but I can't remember what its called right now. But that will only get you 4G on 64-bit Windows. And if Excel really wasn't designed to handle large addresses it'll probably become very crash-happy.

 

[GrumpyMan]

Originally posted by: aka1nas
Did you turn off your page file?

I bet he did due to the large amount of ram he has.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

yea a lot of old 32bit code got coded so even when 4gb of memory was present in a system, it wouldnt use more than 2gb so as to prevent it from crashing the system by eating up all the memory address space and starving the OS. i

No, the virtual address limit was 2G so lots of code just assumed they would never be handed an address over that.

it's the same idea as having to add the /3gb flag to your boot.ini in XP so so it will recognize more of your ram when you install more than 2gb and it doesnt recognize it all for some reason.

No, the /3G flag affects the virtual address layout but has no affect at all on the amount of physical memory that Windows will see.

+1, listen to nothinman, he is right on both counts.