Is this a memory problem

Bryan Heit

Well, sort of. I believe all pointers these days, on 32-bit machines, are 32 bits. But they can only address 2^32 bytes, so if your array is of double-precision numbers, or some large structures, you sort-of have had it if you use pointers. But even if you use an array of whateveritis, the subscript calculations at some point will have to multiply the subscript by the data-size, and that better not exceed 2^32 either. And if you need room for a run-time stack or program code, and the OS does not distinguish between instruction space and data space, you are uppa da creek.

But let us look at 80,000 8-byte things. That is only 640,000 bytes which is far less than 2^32. In fact it is a little less than 2^20. So something else is the matter. Could you have a small memory and insufficient paging space? Or are you dealing with an array of large structures?

Or, more likely, do you have a program bug where you use the value of a variable before buttigning a value to it? This is common and gives unpredictable results.

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