Out of memory - will IGOR64 help?

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Wed, 11/09/2011 - 08:55 am

So I have read up on the memory management help topic as well as the discussion of IGOR64.

I still have one outstanding question...
I load ~100MB binary file and subsequently do a bunch of analysis.
During the analysis I create some large waves (~ 2E7 points at double precision) and many small waves.
I am running up against out of memory errors (when trying to use the "Make" command to create another DP wave of 2E7 points) and was wondering if IGOR64 would help.
I know that I am probably facing some fragmentation issues - the total size of the waves I have is ~2 GB, less than 4 GB limit.
Even if I clean up a bit and kill a bunch of waves I still have problems.

Would IGOR64 help in this regard?
Since it allows for loading larger data files, does this mean that it will have more memory available than the 4 GB allocated in the 32 bit IGOR?
If this would not help, are there any other tricks out there for defragmenting memory (if such a thing exists)?

I am running 64 bit Win7 with 8 GB RAM.
It sounds like IGOR64 will help in your situation. Anytime you get near the theoretical memory limit for IGOR32 (2GB, 3GB or 4GB depending on your system), and get out-of-memory errors, it is very likely that there is not a large enough contiguous block to create your next wave.

Quote:
Since it allows for loading larger data files, does this mean that it will have more memory available than the 4 GB allocated in the 32 bit IGOR?


Yes. In theory you will have a 8GB virtual memory space or larger, depending on your version of Windows. However practically speaking you will be able to load about 7GB (since you have 8GB of physical memory) before paging to disk bogs you down.

Even if you stay below your physical memory limit, processing such a large amount of data may require considerable patience.

Quote:
If this would not help, are there any other tricks out there for defragmenting memory (if such a thing exists)?


No.

Details on IGOR64 can be found here.

NOTE: We recommend that you use IGOR64 only if you need to load gigabytes of data into Igor at one time.

November 9, 2011 at 09:29 am - Permalink

Success!

I installed IGOR64 (went very smoothly and quickly) and was able to run my analysis with no more out of memory problems.
Perhaps you could change the recommendation slightly - even though I did not load GB of Data, I did create GB of data, and IGOR64 saved the day!

November 9, 2011 at 09:44 am - Permalink