NPP v8.6.5 crashes on Space or CRLF

Alan Stu

After reading about other plug-in related crashes, I have disabled all plug-ins. Consistently can accept one line of contiguous text (no spaces). Immediately upon entering a Space or Return (CR-LF), the cursor freezes and about one second later NPP crashes without saving. Same if loading a text file with a space and/or CR-LF. Windows Event Viewer does not say much other than to confirm, yup, NPP crashed. Debug info below.
I tried a few older NPP versions, all crash (why no compiled v8.6.3?). What does work is 32-bit v8.6.5, so that’s what I am using now.
Maybe related, this crash behaviour started approximately when Android Studio was updated to Hedgehog 2023.1.1 Patch 2. The Android emulator also gave trouble (causes a real BSOD!) around then too. Any common dll’s?

Notepad++ v8.6.5 (64-bit)
Build time : Mar 29 2024 - 17:04:43
Path : C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe
Command Line :
Admin mode : OFF
Local Conf mode : OFF
Cloud Config : OFF
Periodic Backup : OFF
OS Name : Windows 11 Home (64-bit
OS Version : 23H2
OS Build : 22631.3447
Current ANSI codepage : 1252
Plugins : none

mkupper

@Alan-Stu and others.

I tried to to reproduce this by starting with 123456789. and multiplying that by ten a few times. My copy of Notepad++ stalled at 90 million characters in the line but it works and did not crash.

However, at 100 million characters I got a crash in 32-bit Notepad++ v6.8.5 when I was opening the file:

---------------------------
Plugin Exception
---------------------------
An exception occurred due to plugin: DSpellCheck.dll



Exception reason: bad allocation
---------------------------
OK   
---------------------------

I then switched to a 64-but copy of Notepad v6.8.5 and was able to get that line to 1.1 billion characters. The jump from 900 million to 1.1 billion characters is slowing down Notepad++ but it still works.

I did not try removing the spell checker plugin as I’m not sure if by “one line of contiguous text (no spaces)” you are trying to work with lines with 100 million to over 1 billion characters.

Also, I’m puzzled as your debug info is for a 64-bit copy of Notepad, which is what I used try to to reproduce, but you mention using 32-bit Notepad++ in your message. I suspect we will need more or better information from you ro reproduce the issue.

mkupper

@Alan-Stu

A couple of things:

How long are the lines you are dealing with? You mentioned “one line of contiguous text (no spaces)”. Is the line hundreds of millions to billions of characters long?
Notepad++ v8.6.3 had a regression and so was deleted and replaced with v8.6.4.
Regarding “this crash behaviour started approximately when Android Studio was updated to Hedgehog 2023.1.1 Patch 2.” You will need to get far more specific about how to reproduce the Notepad++ issue before we can determine that Notepad++ now crashes due to some update or change to Windows or other software.

I decided to re-test see if I can get something closer to your results.

I had two sets of test files.

The x series was created by multiplying the 100 characters ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuv resulting in a single long line.
The y series was created by multiplying the 100 characters ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrst<cr><lf> resulting 98 character long lines that each use 100 bytes of disk storage.

For Notepad++ v8.6.5 (32-bit) running with -noPlugin the results are:

The x long line files open fine up to 100,000,000 bytes. At 200,000,000 bytes Notepad++ created a new tab for the file but never painted it.
The ‘y’ short line files open fine up to 1,000,000,000 bytes. At 2,000,000,000 bytes I get a warning about Exception: File memory allocation failed with There is probably not enough contiguous free memory for the file being loaded by Notepad++ and the file fails to load. Notepad++ handles this more or less gracefully:

With Notepad++ v8.6.5 (64-bit) running with -noPlugin the results are:

The x long line files open fine up to 2,000,000,000 bytes and then allowed me to type a space and then <enter>. It’s getting ~slow~. At 3,000,000,000 bytes Notepad++ seemed to start loading the file but then vanished/exited few minutes later.
The ‘y’ short line files open fine up to 10,000,000,000 bytes (100 million lines). I did not try with larger files as Notepad++ was fast and responsive. I have edited files in the 20gb range at times. We don’t know where the outer limits are.

It appears that when we have a file with a single long line of [A-Za-z] characters only that Notepad++ has issues. For v8.6.5 (32-bit) they started somewhere over 100 million characters and v8.6.5 (64-bit) allowed for long lines up to 2-billion characters and was crashing at 3-billion characters.