How to resolve "Op.sys refuses to provide memory"?

[Titir Bhattacharya]

Hi,

I'm trying to open a .dta file of 2.35 GB size on Stata-64 version 14.2. I use a Windows 10 with 64 bit operating system, and 8 GB RAM.

I'm getting the following error

op. sys. refuses to provide memory
Stata's data-storage memory manager has already allocated 1696m bytes and it just attempted to allocate another
16m bytes. The operating system said no. Perhaps you are running another memory-consuming task and the command
will work later when the task completes. Perhaps you are on a multiuser system that is especially busy and the
command will work later when activity quiets down. Perhaps a system administrator has put a limit on what you
can allocate; see help memory. Or perhaps that's all the memory your computer can allocate to Stata.
r(909);

I was not running any other task at that time. I use Stata-MP.

Can someone help me out?

Thanks

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

The error message is quite clear. Stata must load data into RAM memory, and when trying to do so, it ran out of space and complained. From your description, if you have 8 GB of memory, 6.3 GB are already used by things like Windows and other apps. If you have -preserve-d your dataset in your Stata session, this also counts towards your memory usage. The solution is to either reduce your memory footprint by closing apps, not using -preserve- before this step (or else immediately cancelling it by running -restore, not-), reducing your dataset to only necessary variables or adding more physical memory to your system.

[Mike Lacy]

(Deleted, accidental near-duplicate posting.)

[Mike Lacy]

As it happens, I have a 64-bit version of Stata 14.2 sitting on my machine, which has 8 GB of memory. I have a fair amount of other stuff in memory, too. Nevertheless, without any problems, I created, saved, and reloaded a file of approximately the size in question, using the following code:

clear
set obs 300000
forval i = 1/1000 {
 gen double x`i' = runiform()
}

One thing that's worth a try is to simply restart Windows, load Stata and no other programs, and see if the file can be read then.