I have a need to read in a 1gb raw text file from disk to ram to do some string manipulation in C#.
string contents = File.ReadAllText(path)
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If you REALLY want to do this huge string manipulation in memory then you are NOT out of luck anymore, provided you can meet the following requirements
This will lift all the memory limitations you're facing. Your process memory will be limited only by your computer memory, and there is not a 2GiB limit on a single .NET object starting in .NET 4.5 for x64.