How to increase memory available for arrays?

I am running 64bits Windows and MATLAB R2019b.

When I type "memory", I get:

Maximum possible array:        2314 MB (2.427e+09 bytes) *
Memory available for all arrays:        2314 MB (2.427e+09 bytes) *
Memory used by MATLAB:        2061 MB (2.162e+09 bytes)
Physical Memory (RAM):       16250 MB (1.704e+10 bytes)

But in MATLAB "memory" help page, it says that memory is limited by the smaller of the following

• The largest contiguous memory block found in the MATLAB virtual address space
• The total available system memory

So I can only assume that MATLAB is not able to allocate contiguous memory in its virtual address space that's more than 2GB...

Is this some limitation imposed by Windows 10 Home related to its heap manager?

Or how can I expand this value? Do I have to tweak with windows parameters somewhere?

This memory issue causes MATLAB to crash whenever I am plotting multiple "surf" figures, which rely on many large matrices...

The "Solve out of memory page" does not help, since I have the MATLAB preference set to not limit arrays according to RAM:

When I start MATLAB without JVM, I get

Maximum possible array:        2487 MB (2.608e+09 bytes) *
Memory available for all arrays:        2487 MB (2.608e+09 bytes) *
Memory used by MATLAB:         984 MB (1.031e+09 bytes)
Physical Memory (RAM):       16250 MB (1.704e+10 bytes)

So JVM is not the problem.

I am running MATLAB 9.7.0.1190202 (R2019b, 64bits) on Windows 10 Home (64bits), version 2004, build 19041.388

[James Tursa]

If MATLAB actually crashes when calling surf for out of memory cases, you should submit a bug report. There shouldn't be a crash, just an out of memory error message.

Answer 1

[Matt J]

A simple solution might be to close other applications that might be consuming RAM. For example, closing Microsoft Outlook freed up almost 0.5 GB for me,

K>> memory
Maximum possible array:       18897 MB (1.981e+10 bytes) *
Memory available for all arrays:       18897 MB (1.981e+10 bytes) *
Memory used by MATLAB:       22442 MB (2.353e+10 bytes)
Physical Memory (RAM):       32654 MB (3.424e+10 bytes)

*  Limited by System Memory (physical + swap file) available.
K>> memory
Maximum possible array:       19323 MB (2.026e+10 bytes) *
Memory available for all arrays:       19323 MB (2.026e+10 bytes) *
Memory used by MATLAB:       22434 MB (2.352e+10 bytes)
Physical Memory (RAM):       32654 MB (3.424e+10 bytes)

[Mauricio Girardi Schappo]

OK, closing Firefox + Mathematica made the available memory go up to 7.9 GB

But this is only half of my system memory... I'm not sure that the other 8GB are being used by background processes

[Mauricio Girardi Schappo]

I say that because, while monitoring the task manager, BEFORE doing, say W=eye(28000), Windows says it's using 50% of its total memory, and MATLAB says there's 6500 MB available... Then AFTER doing W=eye(28000), Windows is still using 50% of its total memory, while MATLAB says there's only 500 MB left... So it seems Windows is limitting the available memory to MATLAB...

[Mauricio Girardi Schappo]

Well, analysing the task manager, it seems Windows is sharing 7.9 GB of memory with the video processor

[James Tursa]

Ouch! Buy a GPU card.

[Mauricio Girardi Schappo]

Well, I do have a GPU card... I just set the system to use by default the NVIDEA card... MATLAB now jumped to 9 GB (still about half the system memory)... I looked it up in the Resource Manager... It seems the system has "cached" about 3 GB (I don't know why, but it should be a windows thing), and the rest is being used by MATLAB itself + other processes... So then it seems there's no way I can increase that number for available array memory anyways