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.
The Redmond company directly tied the “out of memory” errors with the practice built into some applications to construct a copy of the video memory resources in virtual memory. In this regard, 32-bit systems with large amounts of video memory are particularly susceptible to the exhaustion of virtual memory, simply because of the large volume of virtual address space reserved for performing an in-memory copy of the video resources.
“To address this problem, Microsoft is changing the way that the video memory manager maintains the content of video memory resources. This change is being made so that a permanent virtual address range does not have to be used for each virtualized allocation. With the new approach, only allocations that are created as “lockable” consume space in the virtual address space of the application. Allocations that are not created as “lockable” do not consume space. This approach significantly reduces the virtual address space that is used. Therefore, the application can run on large video memory configurations without reaching the limits,” Microsoft added.
The Redmond company, however, underscored the fact that while the move introduces a fix for excessive virtual address consumption, the solution is only temporary, as the immutable 2 GB limit will become insufficient as applications evolve. This is why Microsoft now delivers two updates designed to resolve Graphics Virtual Address issues on Windows Vista. You will be able to download the
patches for 32-bit Vista from here,
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A156E265-40FF-468E-BBA2-3D1E1929C416&displaylang=en
and for 64-Vista from here.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=18499035-F799-4F93-BB3C-DB70E22E1C1E&displaylang=en