How to increase heap used by a C program beyond 3gb?

[Jyothish Soman]

I have a C code, which I have written for a large data set. The total memory available on the machine is above 8Gb, but the code is able to only use about 3 Gb. In C, how can I increase the space taken per process.

[johny10151981]

choose a proper compiler may help.........

i am curious to know the solution too

[horace1]

sound like you are using a 32 bit compiler and/or running under a 32 bit operating system.
You need a 64 bit operating system and a compiler that will generate 64 bit code so it can address memory above 4G
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/w...sked-questions

[tdlr]

You need to use a 64 Bit OS and a 64bit compatible compiler because 32 bit porgrams/os's are only able to address 4gb of memory including graphics memory and others, which leaves around 3gb of addressable RAM. So I believe that the real problem is you using a 32 bit system.

edit: woops, 2 minutes too slow ;)

[weaknessforcats]

You can use a segmented database design.

Here you define a segment and store the segments several thousand disc files. Next you build an index file that has the access key plus the segment number plus the offset into that segment. The index resides in memory. Then you use the index file to fetch a segment.

Actaully, I would skip all this engineering and use something like Oracle where all this work is already done.