Re: Re : More on Octave / Win2000 memory limitations

[Dmitri A Sergatskov]

Few things, hopefully some of them of any interest:

Long, long time ago when I still was programming for Windows 3.1
with Borland C 3.0 compiler, windows malloc would allocate 2X amount
of RAM you would ask. I guess it was done for some kind of "protection"
against boundary overwriting. Again it was 7-8 years ago and I did not
do anything useful with Windows in the last 6 years, so may be I
mixed up something. May be it was not Windows feature but Borland's...

We have some Matlab PDE solver here and while running on Linux it
takes less then 40M max. On Windows NT4.0 it requires more then 128 Meg
machine -- otherwise it starts swapping. We did not investigate it
any further, we normally do not run it on Windows.

How do you calculate the size of array? Can you check how much
memory octave is using on your computer? Again, on my Linux machine
when I did in (freshly started) octave:

address@hidden dima]$ octave
GNU Octave, version 2.1.33 (i386-redhat-linux-gnu).
Copyright (C) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 John W. Eaton.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details, type `warranty'.

*** This is a development version of Octave.  Development releases
*** are provided for people who want to help test, debug, and improve
*** Octave.
***
*** If you want a stable, well-tested version of Octave, you should be
*** using one of the stable releases (when this development release
*** was made, the latest stable version was 2.0.16).

octave:1> a=rand(6000,6000);
octave:2>
-----------
"Top" reports the following (sorted by memory use):

Mem:   255604K av,  254008K used,    1596K free,       0K shrd,     504K buff
Swap:  268552K av,  127544K used,  141008K free                   44320K cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
 9578 dima      11   0  277M 195M  1296 S     0.0 78.2   0:56 octave
  890 root      13   0 44248  36M  3240 R     0.3 14.6   5:37 X
  972 dima       9   0  1632 1392   984 S     0.0  0.5   0:05 sawfish
 9472 dima       9   0 12200 1340  1144 S     0.0  0.5   0:13 netscape-commun
 2817 dima      11   0  1736 1300  1160 S     0.3  0.5   1:27 gnome-terminal

==========


Regards,

Dmitri.




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