Memory usage

Analytica User GuideReference sectionsMemory usage

The Memory Usage window displays the amount of memory available on your system, as well as the memory currently in use by all applications, including Windows itself. The memory available on your system is the sum of all physical memory installed on your system and the pagefile on your hard disk, which is used to complement the physical memory.

To display the Memory Usage window, select Show Memory Usage from the Window menu. The memory usage displays in two sizes, depending on whether you check Expanded View. The expanded view contains a large number of memory statistics.

Tip

The above window appears automatically when Analytica runs low on memory.

What if you run out of memory?

What can you do if your model exhausts the RAM on your computer? Here are some options:

Close open applications that you don't need to free up memory for Analytica.

If your model has uncertain variables, you can reduce the Sample size. For exploratory runs, a sample size of only 50 or 100 can provide good insights. If you need larger sample size for final results, try the Large Sample Library which runs a model many times with a small sample size and combines the results for viewing and analysis.

There are often simple ways to modify a model to reduce memory usage. Often just a handful of variables use most of the memory. Use the Performance Profiler library (requires Analytica Enterprise or Optimizer) to find out which variables or functions use most memory (and computation time). Then you can focus on those variables to see if there is a way to reduce the dimensions (indexes). For example, it may generate an intermediate array that takes a lot of memory with a result that is much smaller because it sums, or otherwise aggregates or selects over a dimension. Sometimes you can put in an explicit iteration loop (which may take more time to compute but less memory)

By default, Analytica caches -- i.e. stores -- the value of every variable after computing it. This favors speed of computation over memory use. You can tell it not to cache selected variables. Best to do this for variables that use a lot of memory but are only needed by one result.

Consider adding memory to your computer. RAM is ever cheaper. (This won't help if you have a 32-bit Windows OS.)

Increase the size of your computer’s page file used for virtual memory. Using virtual memory that can slow down the computation. It helps to use a solid state disk (SSD) which is much faster then a conventional hard disk.

Ask Lumina for advice.

If you have a 32-bit Windows OS (and 32-bit version of Analytica), Windows limits the maximum amount of memory that can be used by a 32-bit process to a default limit of 2GB. Since Windows XP, you can increase this limit to 3GB by editing the system file C:\boot.ini. For the line corresponding to your operating in that file, append /3GB and /USERVA options. For example, after your edit, the line may be:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP"/3GB/USERVA

After making the edit, you need to reboot the system for this to take effect.

For more ideas for coping with memory limitations, see Managing Memory and CPU Time for large models.

Memory usage

What if you run out of memory?

See Also