Freeing up memory occupied by mex ?

[John W. Eaton]

On 21-Jan-2009, Rishi Amrit wrote:

|     I am using IPOPT ( https://projects.coin-or.org/Ipopt ) nonlinear solver
| for solving some large scale NLP's. It's used with Octave via mex interface
| provided along with the package. Quite expectedly, while solving large scale
| problems, memory usage will be high. Once an IPOPT call is finished, Octave
| still uses a lot of my system memory untill I exit. If I save all the
| variables in the workspace in a mat file, after the ipopt call, exit octave,
| restart it and load the variables back, I do not have Octave using all the
| memory it was using in the last call. So it seems the mex interface did not
| clean up the memory before coming out of the call. Is there a way to free up
| all that heavy memory that was being used by the mex function, without
| having to restart octave ?

The code in Octave that calls mex functions should free all memory
allocated with the mex/mx functions on exit.  Are you sure that the
leak is not in the ipopt code itself?

After calling ipopt, what happens if you clear all variables in the
workspace?

jwe