Not enough storage is available to process this command in VisualStudio 2008

Question

When I try to compile an assembly in VS 2008, I got (occasionally, usually after 2-3 hours of work with the project) the following error

Metadata file \'[nam         


        

Answer 1

I am getting this error on one of my machines and surprisingly, this problem is not seen on other dev machines. May be something wrong with VS installation. But I found an easier solution. If I delete the .suo file of teh solution and re-open the solution again, it will start working smoothly. Hope this will be useful for somebody in distress..

Answer 2

The error is misleading. It really should say "A large enough contiguous space in virtual memory could not be found to perform the operation". Over time allocations and deallocations of virtual memory space leads to it becoming fragmented. This can lead to situations where a large allocation cannot be filled despite there being a plenty total space available.

I think this what your "segmentation" is refering to. Without knowing all the details of everything else that needs to load and other activity which occupies the 2-3 hour period its difficult to say whether this really is the cause. However I would not put it into the category of unlikely, in fact it is the most likely cause.

Answer 3

I know it has been a long time since this was commented on but I ran into this exact issue today with a telerik dll in VS2010. I had never seen this issue before until today when I was making some setting changes in IE.

There is a setting in Tools/Folder Option/View in the Files and Folders section called "Launch folder windows in a separate process".

I am not sure the amount of memory used for each window when using this setting but until today I have never had this checked. After checking this option for misc reasons I started getting the "not enough storage is available to process this command". The telerik dll is an 18mb dll that we are using located in our library folder as a reference in our project.

Unchecking this resolved the problem.

Just passing along as another possible solution

Answer 4

I had this same issue and in my case, the exception name was very misleading. The actual problem was that the DLL couldn't be loaded at all due to invalid path. The exception i was getting said "

I used DllImport attribute in C#, ASP.NET application with declaration like below and it was causing the exception:

   [DllImport(@"Calculation/lib/supplier/SupplierModule.dll", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall, CharSet = CharSet.Ansi, EntryPoint = "FunctionName")]

Below is working code snippet:

[DllImport(@"Calculation\lib\supplier\SupplierModule.dll", CallingConvention = CallingConvention.StdCall, CharSet = CharSet.Ansi, EntryPoint = "FunctionName")]

The actual problem was using forward slashes in path, instead of back slashes. This cost me way too much to figure out, hope this will help others.