IRAF Ram usage

AnTaR3s wrote on Oct 18, 2012

Hey

I am trying to use blkavg on about 13000 images and my script is very very simple:

...
blkavg (input="Ks_v20091104_00394_11.fit",output="b_Ks_v20091104_00394_11.fit",b1="2",b2="2",option="average")
blkavg (input="Ks_v20091104_00394_12.fit",output="b_Ks_v20091104_00394_12.fit",b1="2",b2="2",option="average")
blkavg (input="Ks_v20091104_00394_13.fit",output="b_Ks_v20091104_00394_13.fit",b1="2",b2="2",option="average")
...

The problem here is that IRAF continuously keeps everything in memory so that I end up filling up my RAM within a minute or so. Is there a way to prevent this or maybe a command that can purge the memory which I could insert in the script after every 10th line or so...?

thanks

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Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on Oct 18, 2012

If you're saying the memory used by the x_images.e binary is growing and you eventually get an 'out of memory' error, then this is a new bug I would have to fix. OTOH, if you're saying the memory usage reported by 'top' or 'free' grows with each image the I would say this is normal in the the sense that the system will try to cache data in memory (and swap out what's unneeded) all the time.

You can try inserting the command 'flpr 0' (zero, not oh) into your script to force the x_images.e binary to restart, but this won't have any effect on the system memory caching (which you shouldn't worry about anyway).

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AnTaR3s wrote on Oct 18, 2012

Hey

Inserting just flpr fixed the problem! :)

thanks

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Last post on Oct 18, 2012