Re: Memory requirements in Mathematica 6
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg83024] Re: Memory requirements in Mathematica 6
- From: Szabolcs Horvát <szhorvat at gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2007 06:03:54 -0500 (EST)
- References: <fgs8h1$48d$1@smc.vnet.net>
Michael Weyrauch wrote: > Hello, > > some years back we solved a problem using Mathematica 3 using > essentially a simple one line algorithm, which however used up nearly all the > 4 GB of memory on our Unix workstation. But it worked... > > Now with Mathematica 6 this very same program on a Linux 64 bit > workstation with 32 GB memory does not run any more. The memory the > Mathematica kernel demands just exceeds what is available, and the kernel quits (or worse, it > shuts down the entire machine and we are in for a reboot. The latter effect just > may be poor process management on the side of our Linux kernel, which is not the issue here.) > > I just wonder if it is really possible that the internal storage requirements of Mathematica 6 > in order to store expressions have so drastically increased (relative to version 3) that > the effect described above can be explained. Does anyone have similar observations > with Mathematica 6? Any other ideas or suggestions? (Of course, tricks like Share[] have already been tried.) > What is that algorithm doing and what kind of data structures is it using? If it is only a single line, could you post it (preferably with comments)? Mathematica 6 *does* fill up the memory more quickly than previous versions, but I have thought that this was mainly because of the plotting commands. In some cases (arrays of real numbers), memory usage should have /de/creased significantly since version 3. Szabolcs