[GAP Forum] Memory Limit of GAP?

[Alexander Hulpke]

The memory limit in GAP is what your machine can cope with -- i.e. I would put it at roughly 3/4 of physical memory - the rest is often used by the operating system and the machine crawls down to an unusable speed if you use more. (and of course limited to <4GB if GAP is compiled for 32bit). GAP itself does not limit the process size and on a modern machine you thus should easily have a magnitude of memory more available than what the student version lets you do.

As a safety device for acidentally huge GAP jobs taking over a machine, GAP will initially issue an Error message ``out of memory'' when processes use more then 256MB, you can simply type 
return;
at this point and GAP will continue with a higher limit (or you could start with the -o command line option to raise the limit a priori).

If you start GAP with the -g command line option you will get intermediate output about memory used.

Best wishes,

  Alexander Hulpke



On Jan 17, 2011, at 11:50 AM, Katie Morrison wrote:

> Hi all, I was wondering what the memory limit is for GAP?  I've been
> performing a number of calculations in the student version of Magma, which
> has a memory limit of 150MB, but now that I'm trying to perform calculations
> with larger matrices, I've exceeded that memory limit.  Does GAP have a
> significantly better memory limit such that it's worth it for me to
> translate my Magma code into GAP code?  Thanks for the advice.
> 
> Katie
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