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re: WnMath22 vs. memory

  • To: mathgroup at yoda.physics.unc.edu
  • Subject: re: WnMath22 vs. memory
  • From: Paul=Rubin%Management%Business at banyan.cl.msu.edu
  • Date: Tue, 14 Jun 94 09:56:32 EDT

Yilmaz Akyildiz <FACP002%SAUPM00.BITNET> wrote:

>I am trying to run WnMath 2.2 on a 486 DX 50 Mhz, 16 MEG RAM,
>all configured by Dos 6.2 and Windows 3.1.
>The moment I try to do any computation, I get the message
>"...running low on memory..".
>It's driving me nuts. I'd appreciate any  help.

I run on a 486DX33 with 8 MB, with no problems, so this is pretty strange.  
Four things to check:

  1)  Do you have Windows installed with a permanent swap file?  If you have 
no swap file, Windows may be hogging a fair bit of that 16 MB.

  2)  When you have a fresh notebook open and the kernel running, how much 
free memory do you have?  The notebook interface displays this in the lower 
right hand corner of the screen.  Assuming that a swap file exists, the 
number displayed is virtual memory (free RAM + free swap file space).

  3)  In addition to RAM, Windows is limited by what it calls "system 
resources," which are something like internal stacks.  (I'm not up on the 
exact details.)  If you have a lot of Windows open, you can run out of 
resources even though you have ample free RAM.  To check this, click on 
"About Mathematica" in the Help menu.  It will tell you the free space in KB 
and the free resources (as a percentage of the total resources).  I read 
somewhere that anything under 20% for the resources figure becomes 
problematic.  (Make sure the kernel is running when you do this.)
    
  4)  I'm running version 2.2.2, and it puts a line in MATH.INI that looks 
like "ExtraPages=####," where "####" is the number of 4KB pages of memory to 
allocate to the kernel.  I don't know whether this was done in version 2.2 or 
not.  (Version 2.2.2 uses MathLink to communicate between kernel and front-
big enough to give the kernel adequate memory.  (Mine is 2000, meaning that 
the kernel is getting close to 8 MB.)

If none of this helps and you're still stuck, e-mail me your CONFIG.SYS and 
AUTOEXEC.BAT files, and maybe your MATH.INI file, and I'll see if I can spot 
anything untoward.






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