Re: gnuplot in Octave review

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

2009/2/11 Sergei Steshenko <address@hidden>:
> Jordi, if you have a 32 bits system, the 4GB limit is _per process_.
>
> I had 8GB of swap in addition to 2GB of physical RAM.
>
> I had 200+ plot windows open because I wanted to see results from a number
> of inner loops.

I'm amazed you even managed to open that many windows. My X refused to
go any further around window 170 or so. :-/  And I'm on an x86_64 with
4 gigs of RAM (and maybe some swap, all I ever use it for is for
hibernating or when I'm stupid enough to mistype something in Octave).

> So, in this case the fact that 'gnuplot' is a separate process _did_ help.

I'm unconvinced that there is any situation where most humans can
gather much information from 200 open windows and that most people
would prefer to solve that problem in a different way (e.g. create an
animation without having to look at 200 individual frames).

> Had plotting been a part of 'octave' process, the whole run would have failed
> at 4GB memory consumption.

I see. Well, maybe for cases like yours, it may be desirable to make
the OpenGL backend as a separate process. Or just keep using gnuplot,
I don't expect it's gonna be completely phased out any time soon.

At any rate, I'll add a few comments to my review about how having a
gnuplot as a separate process can help with memory consumption should
you ever feel like opening 200 windows.

- Jordi G. H.