After reading a few enlightening articles about memory in the .NET technology, Out of Memory does not refer to physical memory, 597499.

I thought I understood why a C# app would throw an out of memory exception -- until I started experimenting with two servers-- both are having 2.5 gigs of ram, windows server 2003 and identical programs running.

The only significant difference between the two being one has 7% hard drive storage left and the other more than 50%.

The server with 7% storage space left is consistently throwing an out of memory while the other is performing consistently well.

My app is a C# web application that process' hundreds of MBs of String object.

Why would this difference happen seeing that the most likely reason for the out of memory issue is out of contiguous virtual address space --

What solutions do you guys propose -- and what do you say about the following 1. turn on the 3gb switch to increase the virtual address space -- 2. instead of using one giant string object, break it up into smaller pieces and collect it in a jagged array (here I have to find a way to return to the caller in some other way as right now, the return type is a string)

thanks SO