Re: [Gretl-devel] out of memory with large lists
On Wed, 7 Sep 2011, Sven Schreiber wrote:
today I got an "out of memory" error from gretl, I think
it's the first
time for me...
It happened when I did something like:
list L1 = L2 - L3
where L2 has 63 elements, and L3 has 13800 elements. That's because L3
has lots of duplicates -- this is of course a bug in my script and I
have corrected that. Nevertheless, given modern computers with Gigabytes
of memory, it still seems strange that gretl shouldn't be able to handle
that, no? Or am I missing something?
Well, in this case the error message is almost certainly misleading.
The "out of memory" flag is raised if the C-library memory
allocation function malloc() returns NULL. This can happen because
somebody has really asked for more memory than the system has
available, but it can also happen if, thanks to some bug, the amount
of memory requested was zero or negative. I suspect the latter in
this case.
If it's possible to create and post a minimal case of this failure
mode, that would be great.
Allin