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."

Comments

Re:Maybe this stems from...

[Shakrai]

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)

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.