How much memory should you be able to allocate?

Question

Background: I am writing a C++ program working with large amounts of geodata, and wish to load large chunks to process at a single go. I am constrained to working with an a

Answer 1

on windows 32 bit, the normal process can take 2 GB at maximum, but with /3GB switch it can reach to 3 GB (for windows 2003).

but in your case I think you are allocating contiguous memory, and so the exception occured.