I want to run this huge C++ project that uses up to 8.3 GB in memory. Can I run this program under certain circumstances or is it impossible ?
It's fine. You just need to be on a 64-bit architecture, and ensure that there's sufficient swap space + physical memory available
It really depends. If the program needs to have all the 8.3 GB in memory all the time (working size), you may need to have a similar amount of memory installed in your computer.
Let's now assume you have 4 GB of RAM. In such a case you will be most probably able to execute the program thanks to the use of swap (hard disk area where memory is swapped in and out with the intention of enlarging the virtual memory size). But, even if it may actually work, it could run really slow (up to the point that is not really usable) because of trashing.
On the other hand, if your program processes 8.3 GB of data, but it is processed in smaller chunks, that will mean that all the data is not in memory all the time. Then, you will not need to have installed such a big amount of RAM in your computer.
As Oli Charlesworth was mentioning you will need a 64-bit system (both the hardware and OS) or, at least, a system with PAE capabilities if you want to install more than 4 GB of RAM in your system.
Yes it is possible. You need to be in a 64-bit environment and, of course, have the RAM available. You may still be unable to allocate more than 4gb of contiguous address space at a time. It's possible that you'll have to allocate it in smaller chunks, though.
Related
My professor said that regularly, we can only use about 2 GB out of 4 GB RAM because the other 2 GB is used by the OS. However, when running some tests, I see that with a 4 GB virtual memory space of a process, I can only allocate a maximum of just under 2 GB using VirtualAlloc() function. Why is that (I was expecting it to be about more than 3 GB)?
As I know, the stack, data, and code segments only use a small amount of memory. One of my friend told me that the other 2 GB is used by OS just like the professor said. However, I think that the professor meant 2 GB of physical memory. It's not in the virtual memory of this process.
Could anyone explain what happens here? Thanks.
Some information:
Physical memory: 4GB.
Virtual memory: 4GB.
OS: Windows 10.
Your professor is correct - 2 GB of your virtual memory are kernel memory.
This way, when a context switch occurs, these 2 GB can stay and only the other 2 need to be swapped. It helps performance.
You can also see here an explanation by Microsoft, including explanations how to increase the user portion to 3 GB.
By the way, the situation is different in 64-bit machines, where the virtual memory is much larger.
It does not have anything to do with RAM, the virtual in VirtualAlloc() tells no lies. Sure, the upper 2GB is reserved to the OS, biggest chunks it needs are the file system cache and the video memory aperture. The latter is the bigger reason why the /3GB boot option no longer works. As you found out, you can never get the full 2GB, your program needs address space as well and is always first. It got it when it was loaded by the OS loader, what is left can be divvied up by VirtualAlloc.
Usually well less than 2 GB, the address space tends to get fragmented by loaded DLLs. Beware that you might use some even if you did not link their import libraries, anti-malware and cloud-storage utilities may inject them. Any heap allocations in your program also tends to cause splits.
These concerns are getting pretty dated, all modern machines boot a 64-bit OS. A 32-bit program now runs in an emulator and the upper range is no longer needed by the OS. You can now get at lot closer to 4GB by linking with the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE linker option. That option by itself gives you a pretty good hint why they originally decided that splitting up the address space like that was considered a good idea. Also the approach taken in 64-bit OSes.
I have a x64 application. It is a bit heavy application (in terms of thread counts, memory needed etc). I'm running this application on a 4GB RAM 64-bit Windows7 Quad core machine. But what i notice is after my application takes around 2.2-2.3 GB Ram it crashes. Is this required behavious? Can 64bit applications at max take only 2.3-2.4 GB RAM from 4GB RAM?
No, check that you don't have any overflows or other bugs first. Even 32-bit applications can address - use more RAM, so it would be ridiculous if it was limited on windows 64-bit.
The remaining memory is free for use, right?
The amount of RAM is of no concern, a process allocates virtual memory. The amount of virtual memory you can allocate in a 64-bit process is only limited by the operating system's ability to provide pages to map the virtual memory to RAM. Which is normally only limited by the largest allowed paging file, assuming you didn't create your own mapping with CreateFileMapping(). It is a system setting, Control Panel + System + Advanced. There's an upper limit as well imposed by the Windows edition, 16 gigabytes for Windows 7 Home Premium, 192 gigabytes for Professional and up.
RAM is only used when your program actually accesses the virtual memory. Which generates a page fault when the memory isn't mapped yet. A 64-bit process typically slows down to a crawl due to these page faults if you allocate and use memory considerably beyond the amount of RAM, well before you consume all available pages.
Since you are considerably South of the typical maximum paging file size, this is surely just another plain old heap corruption bug.
Debug your program. Crashing isn't supposed to happen just because you allocate a lot of memory. The usual suspects: math overflows, memory corruptions, failure to handle errors from memory-allocating routines.
I'v run into an odd problem, my process cannot allocate more than what seems to be slightly below 1 GiB. Windows Task Manager "Mem Usage" column shows values close to 1 GiB when my software gives a bad_alloc exception. Yes, i'v checked that the value passed to memory allocation is sensible. ( no race condition / corruption exists that would make this fail ). Yes, I need all this memory and there is no way around it. ( It's a buffer for images, which cannot be compressed any further )
I'm not trying to allocate the whole 1 GiB memory in one go, there a few allocations around 300 MiB each. Would this cause problems? ( I'll try to see if making more smaller allocations works any better ). Is there some compiler switch or something else that I must set in order to get past 1 GiB? I've seen others complaining about the 2 GiB limit, which would be fine for me.. I just need little bit more :). I'm using VS 2005 with SP1 and i'm running it on a 32 bit XP and it's in C++.
On a 32-bit OS, a process has a 4GB address space in total.
On Windows, half of this is off-limits, so your process has 2GB.
This is 2GB of contiguous memory. But it gets fragmented. Your executable is loaded in at one address, each DLL is loaded at another address, then there's the stack, and heap allocations and so on. So while your process probably has enough free address space, there are no contiguous blocks large enough to fulfill your requests for memory. So making smaller allocations will probably solve it.
If your application is compiled with the LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag, it will be allowed to use as much of the remaining 2GB as Windows can spare. (And the value of that depends on your platform and environment.
for 32-bit code running on a 64-bit OS, you'll get a full 4-GB address space
for 32-bit code running on a 32-bit OS without the /3GB boot switch, the flag means nothing at all
for 32-bit code running on a 32-bit OS with the /3GB boot switch, you'll get 3GB of address space.
So really, setting the flag is always a good idea if your application can handle it (it's basically a capability flag. It tells Windows that we can handle more memory, so if Windows can too, it should just go ahead and give us as large an address space as possible), but you probably can't rely on it having an effect. Unless you're on a 64-bit OS, it's unlikely to buy you much. (The /3GB boot switch is necessary, and it has been known to cause problems with drivers, especially video drivers)
Allocating big chunks of continuous memory is always a problem.
It is very likely to get more memory in smaller chunks
You should redesign your memory structures.
You are right to suspect the larger 300MB allocations. Your process will be able to get close to 2GB (3 if you use the /3GB boot.ini switch and LARGEADDRESSAWARE link flag), but not as a large contiguous block.
Typical solutions for this are to break up the requests into tiles or strips of fixed size (say 256x256x4 bytes) and write an intermediate class to hide this representation detail.
You can quickly verify this by writing a small allocation loop that allocate blocks of different sizes.
You could also check this function from MSDN. 1GB rings a bell from here:
This parameter must be greater than or equal to 13 pages (for example,
53,248 on systems with a 4K page size), and less than the system-wide
maximum (number of available pages minus 512 pages). The default size
is 345 pages (for example, this is 1,413,120 bytes on systems with a
4K page size).
Here they mentioned that default maximum number of pages allowed for a process is 345 pages which is slightly more than 1GB.
When I have a few big allocs like that to do, I use the Windows function VirtualAlloc, to avoid stressing the default allocator.
Another way forward might be to use nedmalloc in your project.
I'm using an image manipulation library that throws an exception when I attempt to load images > 4GB in size. It claims to be 64bit, but wouldn't a 64bit library allow loading images larger than that? I think they recompiled their C libraries using a 64 bit memory model/compiler but still used unsigned integers and failed upgrade to use 64 bit types.
Is that a reasonable conclusion?
Edit - As an after-thought can OS memory become so fragemented that allocation of large chunks is no longer possible? (It doesn't work right after a reboot either, but just wondering.) What about under .NET? Can the .NET managed memory become so fragmented that allocation of large chunks fails?
It's a reasonable suggestion, however the exact cause could be a number of things - for example what OS are you running, how much RAM / swap do you have? The application/OS may not over-commit virtual memory so you'll need 4GB (or more) of free RAM to open the image.
Out of interest does it seem to be a definite stop at the 4GB boundary - i.e. does a 3.99GB image succeed, but a 4GB one fail - you say it does which would suggest a definite use of a 32bit size in the libraries data structures.
Update
With regards your second question - not really. Pretty much all modern OS's use virtual memory, so each process gets it's own contiguous address space. A single contiguous region in a processes' address space doesn't need to be backed by contiguous physical RAM, it can be made up of a number of separate physical areas of RAM made to look like they are contiguous; so the OS doesn't need to have a single 4GB chunk of RAM free to give your application a 4GB chunk.
It's possible that an application could fragment it's virtual address space such that there isn't room for a contiguous 4GB region, but considering the size of a 64-bit address space it's probably highly unlikely in your scenario.
Yes, unless perhaps the binary file format itself limits the size of images.
Background: I am writing a C++ program working with large amounts of geodata, and wish to load large chunks to process at a single go. I am constrained to working with an app compiled for 32 bit machines. The machine I am testing on is running a 64 bit OS (Windows 7) and has 6 gig of ram. Using MS VS 2008.
I have the following code:
byte* pTempBuffer2[3];
try
{
//size_t nBufSize = nBandBytes*m_nBandCount;
pTempBuffer2[0] = new byte[nBandBytes];
pTempBuffer2[1] = new byte[nBandBytes];
pTempBuffer2[2] = new byte[nBandBytes];
}
catch (std::bad_alloc)
{
// If we didn't get the memory just don't buffer and we will get data one
// piece at a time.
return;
}
I was hoping that I would be able to allocate memory until the app reached the 4 gigabyte limit of 32 bit addressing. However, when nBandBytes is 466,560,000 the new throws std::bad_alloc on the second try. At this stage, the working set (memory) value for the process is 665,232 K So, it I don't seem to be able to get even a gig of memory allocated.
There has been some mention of a 2 gig limit for applications in 32 bit Windows which may be extended to 3 gig with the /3GB switch for win32. This is good advice under that environment, but not relevant to this case.
How much memory should you be able to allocate under the 64 bit OS with a 32 bit application?
As much as the OS wants to give you. By default, Windows lets a 32-bit process have 2GB of address space. And this is split into several chunks. One area is set aside for the stack, others for each executable and dll that is loaded. Whatever is left can be dynamically allocated, but there's no guarantee that it'll be one big contiguous chunk. It might be several smaller chunks of a couple of hundred MB each.
If you compile with the LargeAddressAware flag, 64-bit Windows will let you use the full 4GB address space, which should help a bit, but in general,
you shouldn't assume that the available memory is contiguous. You should be able to work with multiple smaller allocations rather than a few big ones, and
You should compile it as a 64-bit application if you need a lot of memory.
on windows 32 bit, the normal process can take 2 GB at maximum, but with /3GB switch it can reach to 3 GB (for windows 2003).
but in your case I think you are allocating contiguous memory, and so the exception occured.
You can allocate as much memory as your page file will let you - even without the /3GB switch, you can allocate 4GB of memory without much difficulty.
Read this article for a good overview of how to think about physical memory, virtual memory, and address space (all three are different things). In a nutshell, you have exactly as much physical memory as you have RAM, but your app really has no interaction with that physical memory at all - it's just a convenient place to store the data that in your virtual memory. Your virtual memory is limited by the size of your pagefile, and the amount your app can use is limited by how much other apps are using (although you can allocate more, providing you don't actually use it). Your address space in the 32 bit world is 4GB. Of those, 2 GB are allocated to the kernel (or 1GB if you use the /3BG switch). Of the 2GB that are left, some is going to be used up by your stack, some by the program you are currently running, (and all the dlls, etc..). It's going to get fragmented, and you are only going to be able to get so much contiguous space - this is where your allocation is failing. But since that address space is just a convenient way to access the virtual memory you have allocated for you, it's possible to allocate much more memory, and bring chunks of it into your address space a few at a time.
Raymond Chen has an example of how to allocate 4GB of memory and map part of it into a section of your address space.
Under 32-bit Windows, the maximum allocatable is 16TB and 256TB in 64 bit Windows.
And if you're really into how memory management works in Windows, read this article.
During the ElephantsDream project the Blender Foundation with Blender 3D had similar problems (though on Mac). Can't include the link but google: blender3d memory allocation problem and it will be the first item.
The solution involved File Mapping. Haven't tried it myself but you can read up on it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366556(VS.85).aspx
With nBandBytes at 466,560,000, you are trying to allocate 1.4 GB. A 32-bit app typically only has access to 2 GB of memory (more if you boot with /3GB and the executable is marked as large address space aware). You may be hard pressed to find that many blocks of contiguous address space for your large chunks of memory.
If you want to allocate gigabytes of memory on a 64-bit OS, use a 64-bit process.
You should be able to allocate a total of about 2GB per process. This article (PDF) explains the details. However, you probably won't be able to get a single, contiguous block that is even close to that large.
Even if you allocate in smaller chunks, you couldn't get the memory you need, especially if the surrounding program has unpredictable memory behavior, or if you need to run on different operating systems. In my experience, the heap space on a 32-bit process caps at around 1.2GB.
At this amount of memory, I would recommend manually writing to disk. Wrap your arrays in a class that manages the memory and writes to temporary files when necessary. Hopefully the characteristics of your program are such that you could effectively cache parts of that data without hitting the disk too much.
Sysinternals VMMap is great for investigating virtual address space fragmentation, which is probably limiting how much contiguous memory you can allocate. I recommend setting it to display free space, then sorting by size to find the largest free areas, then sorting by address to see what is separating the largest free areas (probably rebased DLLs, shared memory regions, or other heaps).
Avoiding extremely large contiguous allocations is probably for the best, as others have suggested.
Setting LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE=YES (as jalf suggested) is good, as long as the libraries that your application depends on are compatible with it. If you do so, you should test your code with the AllocationPreference registry key set to enable top-down virtual address allocation.