MATLAB: Matlab is giving an “out of memory” error while only using a fraction of the RAM. Is there an artificial RAM limit in the settings somewhere

memory

It says I'm only using 1.3 GB of RAM, when I actually have 16 GB, but it's saying I don't have enough. How can I allow it to use more RAM? I'm running 2017b 64bit on a Windows 10 pc.

 >> memory
Maximum possible array:        8573 MB (8.989e+09 bytes) *
Memory available for all arrays:        8573 MB (8.989e+09 bytes) *
Memory used by MATLAB:        1339 MB (1.404e+09 bytes)
Physical Memory (RAM):       16307 MB (1.710e+10 bytes)

I'm guessing I have to adjust the 'Memory available for all arrays' somehow?

I ran the same script on another PC with 16 GB of RAM and it worked fine.

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I figured out what was wrong, I wanted to make a 1x52560 vector, but I wrote the script wrong so it tried to make a 52560x52560, and that one variable was consuming all of my RAM.

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The information show, that Matlab can allocate an array with 17GB. Beside the physical RAM, a swap file allows to allocate this amount of memory.

The impression is wrong, that the memory used by Matlab is limited.

Please post the command, which causes the Out-of-memory error. Perhaps there is simply a bug in it.

MATLAB: Out of memory error

You might just be out of memory. You appear to be using a 32 bit version of MATLAB, are so are being limited by the fact that MS Windows can give 32 bit processes at most 3.0 Gigabytes of memory, and even then can only give that much memory if a special boot-time flag was given.

If you were able to switch to a 64 bit version of memory on a 64 bit operating system on the same computer, then you would be able to configure your system to add swap space that your MATLAB program could use. This would, however, probably be rather slow.

Better would be to get a computer with more memory and 64 bit Windows and a 64 bit version of MATLAB.

It is possible that your system does have enough memory to store the matrix (but would probably fail to try to use the matrix.) The line

SR(tn,:,:)=SS;

being the problem hints to me that the software is not pre-allocating all of the memory to store the data. When you do not pre-allocate an output matrix, then each time you go to grow the output matrix, it needs to take a copy of the data, which temporarily duplicates the data in memory, possibly filing up memory. If the code had done something like

SR = zeros(83, 640, 480);    %but with appropriate sizes!

ahead of time then that problem would not occur.

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