[SciPy-User] memory errors when using savemat

[Pauli Virtanen]

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 10:37:33 -0700, Tyrel Newton wrote:
> I'm trying to use scipy.io.savemat to export a very large set of data to
> a .mat file. The dataset contains around 20 million floats. When I try
> to export this to a .mat file, I get a MemoryError. The specific
> MemoryError is:
> 
> File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\scipy\io\matlab\miobase.py", line
> 557 in write_bytes
> 	self.file_stream.write(arr.tostring(order='F'))

What is the complete error message? -- It typically indicates the 
specific part in C code the error originates from. (The full traceback, 
thanks!)

On the other hand, along that code path it seems the only source of a 
MemoryError can really be a failure to allocate memory for the tostring. 
Your data apparently needs 160 MB free for this to succeed -- which is 
not so much. So the question comes to what is the memory usage of the 
code when saving, compared to the available free memory?

-- 
Pauli Virtanen