Is there a way to read a resource piece meal?

NETMF & Gadgeteer
1

I threw a couple of things into Resources of my project (running on USBizi). However, when I read them back at runtime via the following:

string s = Resources.GetString(Resources.StringResources.App)

it throws an Out of Memory exception. So is there a way to read the resource in a piece meal fashion, perhaps, like, 1kb at a time?

If not, are there any alternatives to storing the resources elsewhere (e.g. i do not have an SD card in my design).

Thanks.

2

No, you need to split your strings before adding to resources but why do you have such large string or where is memory being used?!

3

The resource is not that large, less than 2k. But I need to manipulate it and eventually send it through the comport.

Something happens inside the Comport code that generates the OOM. The function takes a string parameter (data), converts it to a byte array and sends it to an instance of SerialPort (sp). The .Length of the data string is 1989

Note the following code and Debug.GC(false) outputs.


                // 15228
                sp.DiscardOutBuffer();
                // 12300 ??? 
                byte[] buffer = StrToByteArray(data);
                // 10332
                sp.Write(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);  -- it blows up here.

So I am guessing that some data handling is going on in the SerialPort object that requires more memory that is available.

If I reduce the data parameter to 1000 bytes, it never crashes, ever.

I should mention that I am using GHI sdk v1.08 from 8/2010.

4

rgelb, That’s a really old version of the SDK. Have you tried this on the current version to see if this is perhaps a problem that has been fixed? If you can’t test it for some reason, please post your StrToByteArray() also and I’ll test it. Also, please use code tags when posting code.

5

Here is StrToByteArray


        public static byte[] StrToByteArray(string str)
        {
            System.Text.UTF8Encoding encoding = new System.Text.UTF8Encoding();
            return encoding.GetBytes(str);
        }

But that is not where it blows up. In fact it works exactly as I would have expected. Before the call, there was 12300 bytes available, after the call 10332, because it converted a string of length 1998 to a byte array.

The problem is in SerialPort.Write and possibly in SerialPort.DiscardOutBuffer methods.

I’ll give it a shot with a later version of the SDK (was really trying to avoid it).

6

What if you Write() out buffer 1000 bytes at a time?

I wanted StrToByteArray() so I could test your code :slight_smile: Setting up now…

7

I’ve been able to Write() out over 4K. So, if this is a problem related to Write() then it has been corrected. Definitely try on the latest SDK.

8

I think the point is to try it while only 10k of RAM is available. Was that your situation?

9

That will take a little longer to setup. Gotta get to bed tonight. I’ll try to recreate that situation tomorrow. In the meantime, you might try using a loop with the offset and length parameters to write out 1K at a time?