Memory usage for rand(1000) (was: Recommend tela)

[John W. Eaton]

On  8-Sep-1998, address@hidden <address@hidden> wrote:

| By the way, in octave2.0.13, I try rand(1000) and I get a memory exhausted 
| error and it takes unreasonable long time. Does anyone here have same 
| experiences? My machine is linux 2.0.35 with 32M Ram P200.

Are you trying to display the result in the pager, or just assign it
to a variable?

To compute the result and assign it to a variable will require a
minimum of 8MB just for the data, plus whatever memory Octave requires
just to start.  I think you should be able to do this computation
fairly easily on your system if you are not using other memory-hungry
applications at the same time or if you have enough swap space
available.

To attempt to display the result in the pager will require buffering
lots of additional data (the formatted output that is eventually
displayed on your screen).  I'd estimate that it would take another
15MB of storage if you are using the default format style.

jwe