How To Open a 3GB Text File

At work the other day we ran a trace on an application that produced a massive log file in no time at all. It nearly crashed the server!

Luckily, we avoided disaster but I still needed to open the file so I extract the small part of it I needed.

If you simply double click a huge text file in Windows you will wait a long time as it tries to load the entire thing into memory.

What you need is a program that will load it to some temporary disk space. You might wait a short time for it to open but you can normally start looking through it immediately, even while the rest of the file is still loading.

I looked around and found a few. One person recommended TextPad. I have not gotten around to trying it but apparently it will do the job.

The one I used first and was sufficient for my needs was Large Text File Viewer. On first running it, it looked a lot like some kind of hacking application! I was a little worried by that but it worked absolutely fine and did a great job. I was able to scroll down to the time period of the log file I needed, select the text I wanted and save to a new file.