Re: How Much Memory Do I Need?

[Robert A. Macy]

Increase RAM!

Else the swapping can really, really slow down things.

On Tue, 17 Jul 2007 20:01:46 -0700 (PDT)
 Jim scott <address@hidden> wrote:
> I am attempting to set up a data logging system for a
> research experiment. (minimal budget)
> 
> I am capturing about 10 minutes of data (voltage and
> current) via the sound card using Audacity.
> 
> I then wish to process the data (very large files) using
> Octave.
> 
> 10 minutes of one channel at 44,100 sps and 16 bits per
> sample yields approximately 52.92 megabytes of data.
>  This becomes 105.84 megabytes for voltage and current
> (two channels or stereo on the sound card).  Put another
> way, 10minutesX60secondsX44100samplesX2channels = a
> column vector of 52.92 million columns.
> 
> The current system is:
> Pentium 3 866MHz 256Mbytes RAM
> Ubuntu 7.04
> Octave 2.9.9 (i486-pc-linux-gnu)
> Operator: Electrical engineer with basic Unix/Linux
> knowledge.
> 
> Just how much storage do I need for, say a 100 million
> entries?  How do I go about allocating the biggest chunk
> possible for Octave?  I can add  physical RAM, but
> probably not much more than 1Gb.  Can I reduce the
> precision of the variables to 16 bit fixed point?  How
> about swap space (probably slower)?
> 
> Anyway, I am very impressed with Octave and the progress
> that has been made over the past decade.
> 
> Thanks in advance for your help.