Graphics and memory opinions

[Daniel J Sebald]

Hi Folks,

I recall from time to time comments about the non-beauty of gnuplot plots, but in my opinion comparing them against other plotting software in common use on Windows machines I find them clean and simple.  The colored backgrounds of other plotting programs get kind of old after a while.  Also, gnuplot X11 makes good use of a window by keep margins thin by default.  Some other programs leave all kinds of space in the margins.  In any case, Octave graphics is pretty nice right now.

The one area where Octave seems a bit limiting is working with large data.  Octave seems to require so much memory in order to load memory.  (Well, should assume it's Octave, could be Linux that has memory issues.)  From my rough guess, Octave requires free space of about 6-9 times the size of the file being loaded, at least for ASCII files.  For example, using 'load' on a 100 MB file will push Linux to the edge of 1 GB memory and the system will slow to a crawl.

What seems to happen is that a lot of memory is used to load data, then after the data is loaded the memory will drop down to something that reflects what one might guess.  John, what are your feelings on memory usage by Octave?  Could it be more efficient?  Is Linux not as efficient as it could be?

Dan