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From the original thread starter:

I tried your suggestion about opening the file(s) in binary mode, from the Open dialog in TextPad: both huge files open fine in that mode! And very quickly... . But the 16-char snippets of ASCII in the binary mode viewscreen are not very helpful to me: of course I wish for the full 80-col field, as before.

He said the large file can be opened in binary mode.

I'm just curious to know is there any difference in dealing with memory mapped file in text mode and binary mode?

bbadmin,

Thank you for your prompt explanation.

You explain that the memory management strategy is to request contiguous VM equal to the filesize to allow it to be memory mapped.

Memory mapping provides significant performance advantages compared with allocating memory on the heap, but can have this disadvantage for very big files.

The "disadvantage" is really a limitation, since such large files can simply not be read at all.

This is a performance trade off that works for the vast majority of files that TextPad is asked to edit, but there will always be exceptions, due to operating system limitations.

Is there perhaps an alternative memory management strategy that could be accessed via a switch such that the exception could be accommodated, albeit with a performance penalty? This would cater for everybody, and from these threads there are a number of "exceptional" users of this otherwise superb product.