4GB Patch

notareal · 14 Sept 2010, 21:00

Anyone familiar with 4GB Patch? I have understood that some have managed to use it for SU for full 4GB address space under 64-bit windows. I have not tested that, but if someone is adventurous enough, it would be interesting to hear if using that would solve some memory issues with SU (or any 32-bit program under win 64-bit). I believe that it will enable "IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE" -flag on executable.

302 Found

(ntcore.com)

note: I would not test something like that in a production machine.

Rich O Brien · 14 Sept 2010, 21:08

Thom has mentioned this several times and Google was made aware at Basecamp of this. But it seems no more info is forthcoming? Interesting approach all the same and would be nice to hear some facts and figures behind implementing it. Or why it's not feasible?

notareal · 15 Sept 2010, 06:52

Enabling "IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE" -flag with linker is trivial. But more interesting, now as it appears to be clear that google is not interested to offer 64-bit SU, is that if patching SketchUp.exe with said patch (or directly enabling flag with hex editor) would work.

Anyhow, this is more theoretical and hopefully google will be inspired to act by them self.

thomthom · 18 Sept 2010, 11:55

Yea - I've been nagging them to look into this.
Even put in a Q in their Q&A section:
http://goo.gl/mod/FOK4

@thomthom said:

"Can SketchUp be made LargeAddressAware so we can use up to 4GB RAM under 64bit OS? Apparently it's pretty much free to do so: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee418798%28VS.85%29.aspx#The__LARGEADDRESSAWARE_flag"

@jbacus said:

It is never quite 'free' to make these sort of changes, but we're looking into it.

So cross your fingers.

I've heard some users over at the ASGVis forum patching SU and reported no issues. But that might be just luck - no guaranty it won't cause predictabilities or crashes if you patch SU. Which is why I hope the SU dev team can look at it and see if it can be out of the box.

And extra 2GB would be nice - and it would not have the performance issues as 64bit. Nor should it be such extra amount of work as 64bit re-engineering. Potentially it could be done without code change - but it's not fully 'free' as the code needs to be reviewed and verified first.

unigami · 7 Jan 2012, 14:27

I just became aware of this patch, and came here looking to see if anyone has tried it out... FYI I did some more searching around and found a recent comment from John Bacus, Product Manager at Google SketchUp (he has a Google+ account btw) responding to a posting on G+ regarding crashes and the suggestion to install this patch, here is his comment:

@unknownuser said:

I'd be interested to hear more about the situations you've encountered where SketchUp is crashing because it ran out of memory– we do monitor user-submitted crash reports ("Bug Splats") closely, and poor memory management isn't usually the root problem. Probably there is something else we can do that will really help to improve SketchUp's stability for you.

I can't tell what the patch you recommend is actually doing, but other similar-sounding patches I've run across are attempting to set the "Large Address Aware" flag on the executable. All current versions of SketchUp already have this flag set.

notareal · 7 Jan 2012, 15:09

Like said, SU will no longer need this patch as it's been flagged as "Large Address Aware". Old topic that should fade in history now (unless you still using SU 7 or ealier).

mac1 · 7 Jan 2012, 16:07

Some miss information floating around:

Windows memory manager controls the access to physical memory via working sets, most programs cannot touch physical memory, and in fact virtual memory can be larger that 4GB;
By setting the 3GB switch in the boot ini file for certain configurations of your system then SU can have 3GB of memory( Less what some device drivers use.) vs the normal two while the kernel gets reduced to 1 GB. I was able to open an ~350MB SU file ( Window Xp sp3, 4GB Ram) using this approach. Does not mean speed was great.
For the 64 bit systems SU is still limited to the 4GB Address space because it runs as a 32 bit app. However the operating system can remap memory to use RAM greater than 4GB so the app. can have the total 4GB. Your BIOS needs to be set correctly to max use of your 64 system. Make sure to read the manual.
For those interested read these articles http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/11/17/3155406.aspx and http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/07/21/3092070.aspx