Memory consumption

Peter Antolík

Hi,
I would like to ask about the memory limit in Notepad++.
Why is not possible to open a larger file than 150/200 MB? Is there any chance that developers will solve this problem?

Claudia Frank

@Peter-Antolík

there is no easy answer on this - I will try to explain this.

Npp is a 32bit application and therefore can only allocate
2^31-1 bytes of ram which is 2.147.483.647.

So, npp can load ~2GB files?
Only in theory, because the underlying scintilla component,
needs to allocate much more then the file size. It is up to 3 times more.
So a file which has 100MB needs to get ~300MB allocated.
The component needs to store all the information about what gets colored, what gets folded and so on,
that’s the reason why much more ram is allocated.

So, can we load ~700MB files?
Again, only in theory. Everything npp loads allocates memory and this means,
not only files get loaded, also plugins and themes need memory to get loaded and this makes
it nearly impossible to say how large can a file be to get loaded because it depends what is already
loaded.

When using the minimalistic version of npp, no plugins, no themes I was able to load text files with ~500MB

Cheers
Claudia