tirsdag 6. januar 2009

How to make VS 2008 swallow more memory

While wating for VS next (2010) which for sure will be 64Bit and massively concurrent on top of the new concurrency APIs in 4.0 (yeah right ;)) this one has been proved to work (thx to Steven Harman):

http://stevenharman.net/blog/archive/2008/04/29/hacking-visual-studio-to-use-more-than-2gigabytes-of-memory.aspx

This should make 4GB virtual memory (logical barrier for 32bit app) available (I think?) but it doesn't look that way. I seems to bump at 3GB virtual space now. It's still a massive improvement though and it makes my 100 project 1MLOC solution actually a bit snappy even with ReSharper running on all sylinders (even running solution wide analysis).

What about physical memory consumption? On my four core Windows 2008 Server 64Bit/8GB dev box I was hoping Stevens trick would release more physical memory than the 2GB it looks like its stopping at now. Anyone have one more trick up their sleeve to tweak the last logical GB out (and I would rather prefer electron flux (physical memory) over magnetic manipulation of iron dust (swap to disk)) while waiting for the above mentioned nirvana?

Actually I hardly see any disk activity at all. The dev box is equipped with a solid battery powered write cache (windows will take care of the read caching, thx Christian for correcting me on that little trivia ;)) in front of 10K+15K RPM disks :) Windows 2008 does a good job of caching stuff it needs in a situation like that. Cannot take the machine with me when I go home though (doesn't matter, I can remote it over VPN anyway).
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Update: I think I have to try the same trick on ReSharper too (parts (most?) of it runs in it's own process) because I am still getting OutOfMemory execption from it.

1 kommentar:

Mr. Lambda sa...

Have you tried JetBrains' fix for OutOfMemoryExceptions?

http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/ReSharper/OutOfMemoryException%2BFix