Maximum Problem Size

Maximum problem size

Memory management in D3PLOT is "dynamic". This means that space is requested from the operating system as it is required and, theoretically, problems up to size limits above can be processed. The only realistic limit will be the ability of your computer to provide memory and processing power.

In practice a typical small workstation will easily process models of 500,000 elements, and addition of more memory and page file (swap) space will raise this limit to several million elements. For example processing a model with 170,000 shells on the author's machine required a total of about 55MBytes of memory. However large animations consume memory, and this may impose a limit upon effective problem size.

Most 32 bit operating systems impose a limit of 2GBytes on any process size, and this will tend to impose the upperbound on these systems. This is due to the maximum memory addresses can be stored in a 32 bit integer (4GB), and the needs of the operating system itself. An exception is x86 hardware under Windows and Linux which, with suitable configuration, will allow 3GB of memory to be used.

On 64 bit systems maximum memory usage is effectively unlimited, since a 64 bit integers permit up to 1.8e19 bytes (16,000,000 Terabytes) to be addressed. The maximum process size will be dictated by the amount of physical and virtual memory available.