I don't use VB.Net very much, still mostly do VB6, but I am doing this project in .Net. I have a huge string of data, 168 Mb that I stream in from a file to a string variable.
Then I have to perform a number of replacements on it before using the data to compile statistics.
Because of the nature of the data, I can't break this up into smaller strings.

The problem is that I get a system out of memory error after a few replacements.

I've used both Replace(x,y,z) and X.Replace(y,z).
The second one gets a little farther in the code before it crashes, but they both crash.


When I run it in the IDE, the IDE is using about 130 Mb of RAM, the Exe of the app is running about 350 Mb, and one svchost.exe runs about 300 Mb

Other than that there are no major RAM uses going on.
The PC has an i7 980x cpu with 12 GB of RAM.

Any suggestions?