From help-request at octave dot org Tue Apr 11 10:35:30 2006
Subject: Re: ERROR: memory exhausted -- trying to return prompt
From: "Robert A. Macy" <macy at california dot com>
To: "Rosa =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Rud=F3_Maun=E9?="  <rosarudomaune at gmail dot com>
Cc: help at octave dot org
Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2006 08:29:20 -0700

I use 2.1.50 on WinXP and had a similar problem with 25MB
.wav files, so I posted the problem and was basically told
that I needed to "expand" the memory allocated to
octave...The best email that came back was...

From: Richard Thomas
<richard dot Munged dot Address dot thomas at jaguar dot latticesemi dot com> 
Subject: Re: Possible to increase 256 Mb Memory Limit?
(Windows 2000) 
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:27:10 +0000 
To: help at octave dot org 
 
I've finally managed to achieve increased memory (using the
combined Cygwin/Octave 2.1.42 p4atlas build under Windows
2000)! Hopefully this might help Robert too. The main
change was that Cygwin/Octave seems to be ignore the
"heap_chunk_in_mb" registry setting for the "local
machine", but does spot the one for the "current user".

In a Command Prompt (DOS) window, to set then check the
registry setting
"C:\Program Files\GNU Octave\bin\regtool" -i set
"/HKCU/Software/GNU Octave/Cygwin/heap_chunk_in_mb" 1216
"C:\Program Files\GNU Octave\bin\regtool" -v list
"/HKCU/Software/GNU Octave/Cygwin"

In theory, you should be able to set it for all users with:
"C:\Program Files\GNU Octave\bin\regtool" -i set
"/HKLM/Software/Cygnus\ Solutions/Cygwin/heap_chunk_in_mb"
1216

but this does not seem to get picked up by Octave. Also,
with my Windows2000 paging size set to 1536 Mb, if I try to
set the heap size to a larger value, Octave fails
immediately. Not sure why happens, but I've got rather more
memory to play with now so I'm happy:
"C:\Program Files\GNU Octave\bin\regtool" -i set
"/HKCU/Software/GNU Octave/Cygwin/heap_chunk_in_mb" 1300
"C:\Program Files\GNU Octave\bin\octave-2.1.4
2-p4atlas.exe"
C:\Program Files\GNU Octave\bin\octave-2.1.42-p4atlas.exe:
*** 2. unable to allo
cate heap, heap_chunk_size 1363148800, Win32 error 8

And if I set it above a certain size "regtool" fails with
the same error, so the registry has to be manually edited
with "regedit".

(calling "regtool" using "system" within Octave seems to
work OK as well, although as Marek points out you have to
be careful when file pathnames have space characters in
them).

Richard
=-=-=-=-=

I then used this batch program every time I installed XP to
expand the memory:

My Batch Program...
cd\
cd Program Files\GNU*\bin
regtool -i set "/HKCU/Software/GNU
Octave/Cygwin/heap_chunk_in_mb" 1024
regtool -v list "/HKCU/Software/GNU Octave/Cygwin"
cd\
cd Documents and Settings\Robert\My Documents

You may want to set yours bigger than 1024 even.  A real
time saver was installing more RAM.  THAT really sped
things up.

               - Robert -


On Tue, 11 Apr 2006 13:30:52 +0200
 "Rosa Rudó Mauné" <rosarudomaune at gmail dot com> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I want to create a sparse matrix from a file. The file
> has got 100247 lines
> and 6042 columns. I read it line by line and I
> concatenate it, but when
> reaching line 73 the program stops and gives an error.
> The mistake is:
> 
> ERROR: memory exhausted -- trying to return prompt
> 
> Do you know how I can solve it?
> 
> Rosa Rudó Mauné



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