Windows Vista “out of memory” errors are intimately connected with the way the operating system manages virtual address space. On Microsoft’s latest operating system, applications have their very own private virtual address space. You must understand that there is no correlation between the virtual address space available to a certain program and the total volume of physical memory installed on the computer. On 32-bit platforms, applications are generally limited under a 2 GB boundary as the maximum size of the virtual address space. In this context, the “out of memory” errors in Windows Vista are generated by applications that have eaten up all the virtual address space allocated to them.

“Every memory allocation, file mapping, or library that is loaded by an application consumes space in this virtual address space. When the application consumes all its virtual address space, any additional such operations fail. Although all applications should be coded to handle memory allocation failures, many applications do not recover correctly from such failures. Therefore, the programs may become unstable or stop responding after they recover from such failures”, Microsoft informed. (more…)

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