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Vista Runs Out of Memory While Copying Files
ta bu shi da yu writes "It appears that, incredibly, Vista can run out of memory while copying files. ZDNet is reporting that not only does it run out of memory after copying 16,400+ files, but that 'often there is little indication that file copy operations haven't completed correctly.' Apparently a fix was scheduled for SP1 but didn't make it; there is a hotfix that you must request."
I have 13K+ music tracks on a backup disk. If I try to copy them with the Explorer UI, it does nothing - No error message or anything. I reverted to Robocopy, which works fine. You must be doing the same thing. Doesn't anyone at Microsoft have a big music collection to copy, or do they just use their Macs and iPods for that?
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
The reason being is I've setup a Vista system and copied about 100,000 files (totaling about 60GB) drive to drive in a single operation, without error. So while I'm not saying this isn't a Vista error, I'm wondering what else has to be done to trigger it. The persisting across reboots, even if you break it down smaller really makes it sound like another program is somehow interfering with the copy. I'll have to mess around with it at work, we have Vista test machines and Cadence installs north of 250,000 files when you install its libraries. I know it installs fine, though that isn't a copy strictly speaking as it is files being extracted from archives.
I'm just wondering if perhaps there isn't more to this than just "OMG Vista runs out of memory!" If it is a memory issue, why then haven't I encountered it, doing far larger amounts of files?
"How the F%$^ can this be a problem?"
To ensure backward comparabillity. I'm a techno luddite. I got my first DVD drive this year and was slow to get CD drives. All my systems have floppy drives.
98 can be made to puke copying a big file from a floppy. If the floppy is bad you may as well reboot. Delete a few gigs from a hard drive and it goes awy for ages and will more often then not kill the gui task. This is very repeatable. Again, if the CD is bad, reboot.
I can make XP croak as well copying huge files from a CD or floppy which is handles very very badly (see 98). And my biggest drive is 20G (albeit a damn fast one). It seems to do ok copying big files from hard disk to hard disk but even with SCSI RAID with huge caches and the correct drivers you can't expect much left of your CPU when its doing this. Do two at once and you may as well go rebuild your transmission while you're waiting. Apparantly DMA and interrupts are unknown concepts at Redmond; PDP-11's did this just fine (unless you turned off DMA and interrupts in which case it was no faster than a 4Mhz Z-80 CP/M system)
There's really no excuse for this. In the days of 8 bit microprocessor systems we still went out and got the biggest pre-production drives we could to see if they'd copy ok. They may have filled a room but the Navy did indeed have 100 megs online pumping its data through an 8085. Eventually. We knew it'd work cause we tried it. This was 1981.
This is why they use real (IBM, SUN) computers to serve up say, the root or com zone. The root zone isn't big but the com zone is. Copying it isn't a problem on any unix system I've tried, just don't try to load it into BIND on anything but a massive computer or it'll just hang. And not gracefully either.
Windows is for games and sometimes works well enough to run some office tools. As long as you don't need accuracy.
Big files or LOTS of small files are a problem for computers. This isn't news folks. It's just sloppy carelessness.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Actually, a lot of the problems I've noticed with XP is related to the stupid fucking way that Windows handles it's file cache. It will literally swap out PROGRAMS YOU ARE ACTIVELY USING to expand the file cache during a large copy/read operation.
Anybody that has ever tried to alt-tab while copying huge files knows about this.... then you sit and wait for the pages to be swapped back into memory. And you might as well get some coffee, cuz with the hard drive already being pegged for the copy operation, it's gonna take awhile. Oh, and once it's finally done and you need to alt-tab back to the original program.... well, hope you need more coffee.
Lately I've been playing with a program called CachemanXP. Google it. It seems to give you more control over the memory and process management functions of Windows. It also lets you do a 'kill -9' equiv, which (as far as I'm aware) even Task Manager won't do, as it insists on trying to do a graceful shutdown first.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
That sort of depends if you are talking average home user or average work user. The average home user may actually have this kind of problem - since downloads to the tmp directory are then copied to the correct folder once downloads are complete. Update EQII, WOW & FFXI & you've gone a long ways towards 16K files. Add in patch Tuesday, and your average user is probably going to hit real close to 16K files if they try to keep the PC up for a month.
I probably come reasonably close to 16K files copied in a week on my work PC, so a crash like that would hit me every other week or so - not something I would consider 'Enterprise Ready'.
MS has a habit of programming for the home environment & pushing it into the Business environment.