Hi,
what are you doing with large 3dm files?
I got a large architectural model file (455MB) and I can’t open it because of lack of memory.
I’m using Rhino 5, 64 bit on Windows 7, 3 GHz processor, 16 GB RAM.
What do you recommend to be able to open that file?
Putting in more RAM? Workaround with other software? Or …?
Regards,
Enza
Buy more RAM. Live can be so easy. RAM is the best investment you can do. 
For now - restart your machine and try to open the file. So you could start with all available RAM.
Also don’t run other applications at the same time. Browsers can take up quite a bit of memory.
Maybe starting Rhino in save mode could be a way to keep the RAM usage low.
Yes, first go to your windows task manager and close all applications that are not essential to run.
When opening your file in Rhino in “save mode”, it isn’t meshed for shaded display. That also saves a lot of memory I think.
Something wrong there - a machine with 16 gigs of RAM should easily be able open a 455 Mb file - assuming there’s a few GB still free. Perhaps there is something wrong with that particular file causing it to not want to open…
–Mitch
Using Rhino in safe mode is NOT a good solution. It is really only meant to try and debug a problem in the case where Rhino is crashing.
We would need to see the file to be able to diagnose the problem. Since it is large and probably best kept as private, you may want to email tech@mcneel.com to get some help.
Something definitely seems funky - I’ve got 16GB in my workstation, and routinely open 500MB files. Yeah, they’re a little slow but they open and function.
Could it be a problem with your memory? Have you considered running something like Memtest86 to diagnose issues there?
It’s possible the 455 MB file can be too big to open on 16GB machine; often times the file size on the HD has nothing to do with how much RAM it will take up once opened. Consider a file with 10,000 of furniture block instances (not uncommon in arch. files) - it will be small on HD but pretty intense in RAM once opened.
Try starting in Wireframe mode and importing the file instead of opening it. You will save memory on render meshes for starters and also you can start chopping / optimizing the file from there…
hth,
–jarek
I have a similar problem. I was working on a file that was around 800mb no problem, but after baking some things from grasshopper, the file ballooned to 90GB (no duplicates or anything) I think the problem was a texture kept duplicating itself without me knowing. Either way, I accidentally closed the file and it seems there is no possible way to open the saved rhino file. I have closed everything else including things in the background, but I crash rhino everytime. I have also tried safemode as well and it also crashes. I have 32GB of ram on this machine.
@heaton5747 - you may be able to get something from the file using Rescue3dmFile >Recover > ReadAll - it may or may not work and it may well take quite a long time - however, what you will get on success is the geometry from the file, no textures, user data, layers etc…
-Pascal