Memory exhausted with big files

[Nedo Papanti]

Hello,

When I try to open a big text file (875 MB) with SciTE 3.5.0 on Windows 7, I get the following error message
"Failure in Scintilla: Memory exhausted. SciTE will now close."

Are there some options to try letting SciTE use more memory (if it's not already the maximum it can use)?

I am not a programmer; just a simple user.

I tried reading file:///C:/Program%20Files%20%28x86%29/SciTE/SciTEDoc.html and found what is written there concerning "cache.layout" and "output.cache.layout" regarding "7 times the size of the text in the document", but I have not tried anything so far.

My system has 8.00 GB (7.88 GB usable) RAM.

Can you help?

Thank you

[Neil Hodgson]

Nedo Papanti:

> When I try to open a big text file (875 MB) with SciTE 3.5.0 on Windows 7, I get the following error message
> "Failure in Scintilla: Memory exhausted. SciTE will now close."
>
> Are there some options to try letting SciTE use more memory (if it's not already the maximum it can use)?

The distributed version of SciTE is a 32-bit application so is limited to 2GB of memory. SciTE allocates enough memory to hold the file plus an equal amount to store the style of each character. There are also data structures to remember where all the lines start and similar. Loading a 400MB file will work for viewing but editing it may cause problems.

> I am not a programmer; just a simple user.

If you were a programmer you could build a 64-bit version of SciTE which would be able to load files up to 2GB.

> Can you help?

Try a different text editor such as vim for large files.

Neil

[Nedo Papanti]

Hi, thx.

> If you were a programmer you could build a 64-bit version of SciTE which would be able to load files up to 2GB.

In my country we say something like: "If my granny had the wheels, she would have been a trolley".

Cheers

[Philippe Lhoste]

On 21/09/2014 00:53, Neil Hodgson wrote:
>> Can you help?
>
> Try a different text editor such as vim for large files.

While I love to use always the same editor for all text files, I know the limitations of
SciTE, which is designed primarily as a source code editor, so targeting mostly relatively
small files.

Note that I have added, a long time ago, a limiter: when SciTE attempts to load a large
file, it can ask the user a confirmation.
This prevent accidental loading of large files, which can be resource intensive in a
network or external drive, and can crash SciTE as you reported.
The corresponding setting is:

max.file.size=5200000

Adjust as needed.

For such large files, it is better to have a reader able to use the memory-map feature,
ie. reading the file on the fly, as it was memory.

For generic files, I have a program named Large Text Viewer (also referred to as LTFViewer).

For logs, which are a common source of large text files, I have glogg [1] and LogExpert.

[1] http://glogg.bonnefon.org/

--
Philippe Lhoste
-- (near) Paris -- France
-- http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

[Nedo Papanti]

You completely got my point: I'd love to use the same editor for all text files and I love SciTE since I edit also scripts.

Thx for suggesting LTFViewer (and the other two) which I am now using.

Cheers