Profiling large applications
Published 11 October 2013
Error message
Snapshot failed: The snapshot failed because it was over 4GB.
Problem
If your application uses a lot of memory, ANTS Memory Profiler can run very slowly.
If your application uses over 4GB of memory, ANTS Memory Profiler may not be able to profile it at all, because snapshots are limited to 4GB for performance reasons.
Possible solution
In ANTS Memory Profiler 8.1, you can choose to collect slightly less information in a snapshot, which will let you profile applications that use more than 4GB. This will also cause snapshot taking to be faster.
The information left out of snapshots is the values of objects. You'd usually see these values by clicking 
next to an object, on the instance list and instance retention graph.
If a snapshot is larger than 4GB, object values will be left out from the snapshot automatically.
To collect less data, when setting up a profiling session, select Make snapshots faster by leaving object values.
If you want to collect some types of object values but leave others out, click Customize.
The types of object values are:
- Contents of arrays
Leaving out array contents will give the greatest benefits.
If you don't select this option, taking snapshots may still be quite slow. - Values of strings
- Values of objects
Values for any other objects apart from arrays and strings.
