I seem to have loads of free RAM even though my script is taking 10 minutes to run

I seem to have loads of free RAM even though my script is taking 10 minutes to run. I have a MacBook Pro i7 with 8GB of RAM and I use a small app called 'Memory Freer' to free up inactive memory. It shows how much RAM is wired/available/free/inactive. I have a script which has different options for the length of one of the variables, N, and I'd like to try out a few of the longer ones, but above a certain length, N, it starts to take my computer upwards of 2 minutes to do it. While this is happening, Memory Freer still says that there's over 4 GB of free RAM. How do I make Matlab use this RAM?

I've looked at the Java memory option in preferences, but that only lets you give it up to 256 MB.

Any help would be great.

[Matt Fig]

Tom's question

I seem to have loads of free RAM even though my script is taking 10 minutes to run. I have a MacBook Pro i7 with 8GB of RAM and I use a small app called 'Memory Freer' to free up inactive memory. It shows how much RAM is wired/available/free/inactive. I have a script which has different options for the length of one of the variables, N, and I'd like to try out a few of the longer ones, but above a certain length, N, it starts to take my computer upwards of 2 minutes to do it. While this is happening, Memory Freer still says that there's over 4 GB of free RAM. How do I make Matlab use this RAM?

I've looked at the Java memory option in preferences, but that only lets you give it up to 256 MB.

Any help would be great.

Answer 1

[Bjorn Gustavsson]

Well, then it seems as if memory is not the limiting factor for the performance of your algorithm, maybe CPU-time/cycles are what start adding up for larger N. So maybe your algorithm is O(N^m) (or worse?) with m larger than 1, perhaps even larger than 3?

It is a bit difficult to have a more detailed opinion given amount of information.

HTH