Re: Use of large memory
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg50430] Re: [mg50412] Use of large memory
- From: "Hobbs, Sylvia (DPH)" <Sylvia.Hobbs at state.ma.us>
- Date: Fri, 3 Sep 2004 03:35:29 -0400 (EDT)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
So the stork has just delivered a new bouncing baby Pentium (CONGRATULATIONS!) and its memory diapers are full (treasure these moments). If you haven't already tried this, then click on Control Panel, Click on System, Advanced, Page File Size Virtual Memory, and increase BOTH the Minimum Allowed AND the Maximum Allowed to the same amount = 4095 megabytes, this can eliminate some memory errors and also eliminates waiting around while the operating system thrashes between the minimum and maximum. For new computers if you installed the applications yourself and have all of the CDs, you can remove and reinstall applications in such a way that the virtual memory is as close to the front of the drive as possible. When you reinstall, first install the barest part of the operating system, then, as described above, reset Minimum and Maximum memory, then reinstall all the other bells and whistles and other applications. If you have two physical drives (not logical drives where one physical drive is partitioned into two drives), these two physical drives have two IDE controller slots on the motherboard. It is best if the virtual memory - the page file system is handled by one disk controller on one physical drive and data files are handled by the other on the second physical drive. You mitigate memory flatulence if data crunches on a separate physical drive location from the virtual memory pagefile.sys. A word of caution though, if you need to listen to the new Beastie Boys CD or books on CD while running an application and if that application shares the same IDE controller as the CD, when the CD runs it will slow down the application. That's why some prefer one IDE controller for two physical hard drives and the other controller for the CD ROM. Sylvia Hobbs -----Original Message----- From: Gerry Flanagan [mailto:flanagan at materials-sciences.com] To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net Subject: [mg50430] [mg50412] Use of large memory I was running into memory limits for a large numerical problem in V5.0. The fastest fix (I thought) was to get a large amount of RAM. We purchased a Pentium 4 machine running XP, with 4GB of memory. I built a test function that progressively uses more memory and prints MemoryUsed[]. Every time I get to just under 2GB of memory, I get the out-of-memory error from the kernal. There's nothing else running, and task manager says there's plenty left. Has anyone found some Windows XP tweak that allows Mathematica to use what's available? Would this all work better in Linux? Gerry Flanagan