Re : More on Octave / Win2000 memory limitations

[Chris Mellen]

Many thanks to all those who have replied to the original post. I have made
some progress with my problem and thought I would post the results to inform
any who might be interested.

In my original setup Octave was called via a desktop shortcut to an
Octave.bat file. This file contained simply :

@echo off
:: ..generated by GNU Octave setup.bat
if not exist \tmp\nul mkdir \tmp
"C:\PROGRA~1\GNU\OCTAVE\\bin\bash" --login start
rd \tmp

With this arrangement Octave appeared to be limited to using arrays < ~17Mb
in size (on my system). I have a feeling this might be limitation of the Dos
environment used to start the bash shell. On my system a more sucessful
arrangment appears to be to start the bash shell & Octave directly from the
Octave shortcut. On my system this is done by altering the 'target' line in
the shortcut properties to :

"C:\Program Files\GNU\Octave\bin\BASH.EXE" --login start

I am now able to use arrays of ~128Mb before receiving the "error: memory
exhausted -- trying to return to prompt" message. This in itself is still
'strange' however, as the system I am on has 512Mb of RAM. One correspondent
suggested that the Cygwin bash heap chunk size should be altered - it
apparently defaults to 128Mb - a number suspicously close to my current
maximum array size. The procedure for increasing the heap chunk size is
apparently to add the key :

heap_chunk_in_mb

to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Cygnus Solutions\CYGWIN.DLL setup\b15.0 in the
Win2K registry. The value assigned to the key should be the max. heap chunk
size, in Mb. I set heap_chunk_in_mb to 512 - my RAM size. Unfortunately this
has not solved the 'problem'. My maximum array size still seems to be ~128Mb
... That this is not the cause of my limitation seems to be confirmed when I
set 'heap_chunk_in_mb' to say 4Mb - then I can still create ~128Mb arrays.

Chris.







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