.NET Framework - What is the limit for memory a .NET process or AppDomain can use?

Asked By Max2006

04-Jun-08 06:49 PM

Hi,

What is the limit for memory that a .NET process or AppDomain can use?

Thank you,
Max

04-Jun-08 08:25 PM

For 32 bit Windows ther eis a limit of 2 (or 3 if so configured) GB
of virtual memory (which is what .NET sees).

For 64 bit Windows the limit may not be the sky, but it is high - higher
than what you can use.

Arne

04-Jun-08 10:35 PM

Thank you Arne for help..

Could you refer me to msdn or online resource that explain this?

Thanks again,
Max

04-Jun-08 10:43 PM

Google finds links like:

http://blogs.msdn.com/tom/archive/2008/04/10/chat-question-memory-limits-for-32-bit-and-64-bit-processes.aspx
http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=933856

Arne

05-Jun-08 01:38 AM

Hi Max,

Net AppDomain or Process does not have hard-coded memory limit in
principle. So the memory limit normally lies with the underlying OS memory
manager limitation. As Arne pointed out, the modern OS uses the virtual
memory management, so all the memory usage comes from the virtual memory
space instead of physical memory. For 32bit OS, 2^32 bytes(4GB) are
available to a process. However, since the OS kernel normally uses 2GB
virtual space. There are only 2GB left for the process user-mode code. So
we may believe that the memory limit for a .Net process/AppDomain is 2GB.

Can you tell me why you want to know of the memory limitation for .Net
process/AppDomain? In .Net world, the memory is abstracted as managed
objects. The .Net developers seldom touch or deal with memory directly
unless you are using unsafe code or p/invoke COM interop. Also, in the CLR,
the .Net GC is responsible for us to free the managed objects memory and
return to managed heap.

Do you allocate memory directly for native code? If we can understand your
purpose and problem context better, we may have a better solution. Thanks.

Best regards,
Jeffrey Tan
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06-Jun-08 12:45 AM

I agree with TAN, that there is no hardcoded memory limit, it depends on the
RAM size and the paging memory size.

--
Regards,
Mudassar Hassan
Software Engineer
http://mudassarhassan.spaces.live.com/