How can a moderately sized memory allocation fail in a 64 bit process on Mac OS X?

Question

I\'m building a photo book layout application. The application frequently decompresses JPEG images into in-memory bitmap buffers. The size of the images is constrained to 10

Answer 1

Even though a 64 bit computer can theoretically address 18 EB, current processors are limited to 256 TB. Of course, you aren't reaching this limit either. But the amount of memory your process can use at one time is limited to the amount of RAM available. The OS may also limit the amount of RAM you can use. According to the link you posted, "Even for computers that have 4 or more gigabytes of RAM available, the system rarely dedicates this much RAM to a single process."