Why am I getting an Out Of Memory Exception in my C# application?

Question

My memory is 4G physical, but why I got out of memory exception even if I create just 1.5G memory object. Any ideas why? (I saw at the same time, in the performance tab of task manager the memory is not full occupied, and I could also type here -- so memory is not actually low, so I think I hit some other memory limitations)?

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace TestBigMemoryv1
{
    class MemoryHolderFoo
    {
        static Random seed = new Random();
        public Int32 holder1;
        public Int32 holder2;
        public Int64 holder3;

        public MemoryHolderFoo()
        {
            // prevent from optimized out
            holder1 = (Int32)seed.NextDouble();
            holder2 = (Int32)seed.NextDouble();
            holder3 = (Int64)seed.NextDouble();
        }
    }

    class Program
    {
        static int MemoryThreshold = 1500; //M
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            int persize = 16;
            int number = MemoryThreshold * 1000 * 1000/ persize;
            MemoryHolderFoo[] pool = new MemoryHolderFoo[number];
            for (int i = 0; i < number; i++)
            {
                pool[i] = new MemoryHolderFoo();
                if (i % 10000 == 0)
                {
                    Console.Write(".");
                }
            }

            return;
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

In a normal 32 bit windows app, the process only has 2GB of addressable memory. This is irrelevant to the amount of physical memory that is available.

So 2GB available but 1.5 is the max you can allocate. The key is that your code is not the only code running in the process. The other .5 GB is probably the CLR plus fragmentation in the process.

Update: in .Net 4.5 in 64 bit process you can have large arrays if gcAllowVeryLargeObjects setting is enabled:

On 64-bit platforms, enables arrays that are greater than 2 gigabytes (GB) in total size. The maximum number of elements in an array is UInt32.MaxValue.

<configuration>
  <runtime>
    <gcAllowVeryLargeObjects enabled="true" />
  </runtime>
</configuration>