Wireshark-users: Re: [Wireshark-users] Maximum file size?
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From: Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:56:09 -0700

On Oct 27, 2009, at 9:35 PM, Joel Seidman wrote:
Thank you for your response. Since I'm on a 64-bit computer I was hoping 
that 2 would not be an issue, but it appears it is.
The size of a pointer is not the only limitation on the amount of data an application can allocate - "anonymous" pages (pages that don't permanently live in a file, such as stack pages and pages allocated by the standard memory allocator) have to have *something* backing them up when they're not in main memory; that's what a swap partition (on many UN*Xes) or the swap files/page files (some UN*Xes, such as Mac OS, and Windows) are for.
If, for example, you have a swap partition, and you attempt to allocate more virtual memory in a process than will fit in main memory + the swap partition, that attempt will fail.