MAP\XY_MAP: memory and efficiency
All the considerations below about memory consumption and file access
efficiency are described in details in the document "class-gridding.pdf"
in the CLASS documentation.
XY_MAP relies on the Sic logical VOLATILE_MEMORY as an upper limit for
its temporary memory comsuption. The current value of VOLATILE_MEMORY
can be checked and modified as follows:
LAS> sic log volatile_memory ! Current value
volatile_memory = 90%
LAS> sic log volatile_memory 50% ! % of total RAM
LAS> sic log volatile_memory 512MB ! Explicit size
LAS> sic log volatile_memory 4GB !
90% is a correct value if you are not sharing the resources with several
people, or if you are not running other memory consuming software at the
same time.
If the problem (input table and output cube) fits in memory, the context
is ideal: XY_MAP will process all the channels in a single run. This is
the most efficient from a file access point of view. This means that you
should set VOLATILE_MEMORY as large as possible.
If the problem does not fit in memory, the good point is that XY_MAP is
still able to process the data. However, this implies processing the
channels by slices (intermediate smaller velocity ranges).
When slicing is enabled, the default ordering of the table is not ideal,
and each slice implies traversing the whole input table (knowing that
disk accesses are usually slow). If you want to avoid this, it may be
worth producing in advance a transposed ".bat" table with the command:
LAS> TRANSPOSE mytable.tab mytable.bat 21
This transposition takes also time, but the overall time will be smaller
than letting XY_MAP dealing with a ".tab" table. On the other hand, this
duplicates the table data on disk, and the .bat table must be regenerat-
ed each time .tab table is updated.
Also when slicing is enabled, the default LMV order for the cube is ide-
al. Trying to produce directly a VLM cube (/TYPE VLM) is still possible
to some point, but this enlarges the memory consumption (one more buf-
fer) and increases the number of slices and the processing time. Prefer
LMV order if possible.