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When hosting dedicated Descent 3 servers you may occasionally receive an error message very similar to this one, or even the same, depending on the language version of Descent 3 and your system configuration:

Descent 3 Error

Error: Your system doesn't haven enough available memory to continue.

Here's the message box that pops up:

Where this error message comes from is easily explained: The developers of Descent 3 made the vital mistake of trying to figure out how much resources are available on the computer on which the dedicated server is running. The correct behaviour would have been to request the required amount of memory from the operating system and see if it worked. But they decided to go a way that's going to make it more difficult to run the game on up-to-date hardware, more than 10 years later.

Checking the system resources is usually considered bad software design, but that sermon comes too late now for an old game like Descent 3.

Do not as the message suggests reboot your system. Descent 3 is mistaken, because when it was developed, 2 gigabytes of memory and more weren't so common, and there wasn't a Windows operating system the game could run on that would have supported this amount of RAM either. It's a simple data type overrun, a design flaw in Descent 3 or, simply speaking, a bug now.

Solution:

There is no real solution for this error (except fixing Descent 3, but this is very unlikely to happen, though).

Close as many applications that have been started before the dedicated Descent 3 server. As soon as Descent 3 is running, you can start them up safely again. All Descent 3 really needs is memory in the lower address range to be happy.

There are other solutions, too. For instance, you could try to run the software in a virtual environment (VMware, Microsoft Virtual PC, etc) with a restricted amount of RAM. Or you simply run your dedicated Descent 3 servers on a machine with less memory (yes, with less memory).

Alter-Fox's idea with a disk defragmentation can also help here. Go for a disk cleanup first, then defrag the drive's files. As rediculous as it sounds, but Descent 3 tends to crash more often with fragmented disks. Maybe it's got something to do with the game's memory handling, we don't know, but it really seems to help as well.