Quote Originally Posted by jacek View Post
If you have 512MB of RAM, you shouldn't try to read more than that.
This doesn't make much sense... In most cases (users who dropped text-based interface) the OS/Desktop/backgroud tasks... occupy about half of the available memory (sometimes more). Thus it is highly recommened not to load a full file which is bigger than 40% of your available memory (yet it is possible). In such cases the best way is to read pieces of the file, perform some tasks and then discard them before loading some other new pieces... It should be a little tricky to work this way to sort lines of text but it's still doable.