Earlier today I was stress-testing a SerialPort component for Nito.Async when I ran into an unusual error: ERROR_NO_SYSTEM_RESOURCES (1450).

This error can be caused by exhausting any of several OS resources, though all the examples I’ve found deal with exhausing memory-related resources. In my particular example, I was trying to shove a 600 MB file across a serial port all at once.

There’s a limit to how big of a user-mode buffer one can send to a device driver (so this comes into play if you’re talking to a device, such as a serial port or named pipe; it also affects I/O to regular files if FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING was used). According to Dan Moseley of Microsoft, the basis of this limitation is in how the I/O Manager creates its memory descriptor list (MDL).

I’m in a position where I will need to transfer large amounts of data over serial ports, so I wanted to know how much data can be transferred in a single call. Dan Moseley’s original description updated with the IoAllocateMdl MSDN docs, along with the page size information from the latest revision of Windows Internals was enough information to calculate the answer, which I’ve summarized below.

Maximum I/O Buffer Size for Individual Unbuffered Read/Write Operations
Operating System Architecture Page Size Calculation Maximum I/O Buffer Size
2K/XP/2K3 x86 4096 PAGE_SIZE * (65535 - sizeof(MDL)) / sizeof(ULONG_PTR) 67076096 bytes (63.97 MB)
XP/2K3 x64 4096 PAGE_SIZE * (65535 - sizeof(MDL)) / sizeof(ULONG_PTR) 33525760 bytes (31.97 MB)
2K/XP/2K3 IA-64 8192 PAGE_SIZE * (65535 - sizeof(MDL)) / sizeof(ULONG_PTR) 67051520 bytes (63.95 MB)
Vista/2K8 x86 & x64 4096 (2 GB - PAGE_SIZE) 2147479552 bytes (1.999996 GB)
Vista/2K8 IA-64 8192 (2 GB - PAGE_SIZE) 2147479552 bytes (1.999992 GB)
Win7/2K8R2 x86 & x64 4096 (4 GB - PAGE_SIZE) 4294963200 bytes (3.999996 GB)
Win7/2K8R2 IA-64 8192 (4 GB - PAGE_SIZE) 4294959104 bytes (3.999992 GB)

The lowest entry here is for XP/2K3 running on x64. So, if 64-bit XP is important, then you should not use I/O buffers over ~31 MB. If you ignore 64-bit XP, then you can use I/O buffers up to ~63 MB. Newer operating systems take great strides towards removing this limitation completely.

Note that this table only applies to the buffer passed to a single API call. There are other I/O-related restrictions; in particular, I cannot simply split up my 600 MB file into 16 MB chunks and still send them all at once; the serial port will not be able to keep up with the requests and will eventually run into another limitation (with the same error code, ERROR_NO_SYSTEM_RESOURCES (1450)). The solution is to implement buffering in the application.