Graphics and memory opinions

[John W. Eaton]

On  5-Dec-2008, Daniel J Sebald wrote:

| Octave seems to require so much memory in order to load memory.
| (Well, should assume it's Octave, could be Linux that has memory
| issues.)  From my rough guess, Octave requires free space of about
| 6-9 times the size of the file being loaded, at least for ASCII
| files.  For example, using 'load' on a 100 MB file will push Linux
| to the edge of 1 GB memory and the system will slow to a crawl. 
| 
| What seems to happen is that a lot of memory is used to load data,
| then after the data is loaded the memory will drop down to something
| that reflects what one might guess.

By ASCII files, do you mean files with only columns of numbers?  In
that case, Octave must do some extra work to determine how many
elements are in the matrix.  But I thought we were doing this in a
reasonbly efficient way now.  Or maybe we only discussed fixing it and
no one did the work.  I can't remember.  So the first thing to do is
check the latest development sources and see if the problem persists,
and then if it does, see if there is a better way to determine the
number of elements.

jwe