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Not enough memory available for command

Posted: Tue May 19, 2020 10:44 am
by mousepad
Hello,

I am looking for advice on tackling a very large data set (dataframe > 5GB).

I am trying to understand why sometimes R2MLwiN prints the
Not enough memory available for command
message and does not use storage in pagefile.sys. Whereas other times (say one less variable) the model succeeds and takes use of the storage available in the pagefile.sys. What is stopping MLWIN from using the pagefile available space?

My (likely lacking) understanding is that it would begin to use pagefile.sys once the memory limit has been reached?

Many thanks for any comments/advice.

Re: Not enough memory available for command

Posted: Thu May 21, 2020 1:38 pm
by ChrisCharlton
It is hard to give an exact reason as we don't know exactly which command it was running when this was triggered and how much memory it was requesting, but essentially you will get this error if the C++ exception std::bad_alloc (http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/new/bad_alloc/) is thrown in the back-end. This indicates that the operating system has refused or is unable to provide the block of memory requested. If this happens you will not see the page file being used as the check for a sufficient amount will occur before it completes the allocation attempt.

It may be that if you increase the size of your page file that it will then be able to provide the requested amount, but you would need to experiment with this. I am assuming that you are using the 64-bit version of MLwiN, however if you were using the 32-bit version you would have further complications.