Question

I’m doing some rather long computations, which can easily span a few days. In the course of these computations, sometimes Mathematica will run out of memory. To this end, I’ve ended up resorting to something along the lines of:

ParallelEvaluate[$KernelID]; (* Force the kernels to launch *)
kernels = Kernels[];

Do[
   If[Mod[iteration, n] == 0,
      CloseKernels[kernels];
      LaunchKernels[kernels];
      ClearSystemCache[]];
   (* Complicated stuff here *)
   Export[...], (* If a computation ends early I don't want to lose past results *)
   {iteration, min, max}]

This is great and all, but over time the main kernel accumulates memory. Currently, my main kernel is eating up roughly 1.4 GB of RAM. Is there any way I can force Mathematica to clear out the memory it’s using? I’ve tried littering Share and Clear throughout the many Modules I’m using in my code, but the memory still seems to build up over time.

I’ve tried also to make sure I have nothing big and complicated running outside of a Module, so that something doesn’t stay in scope too long. But even with this I still have my memory issues.

Is there anything I can do about this? I’m always going to have a large amount of memory being used, since most of my calculations involve several large and dense matrices (usually 1200 x 1200, but it can be more), so I’m wary about using MemoryConstrained.

---

Update:

The problem was exactly what Alexey Popkov stated in his answer. If you use Module, memory will leak slowly over time. It happened to be exacerbated in this case because I had multiple Module[..] statements. The “main” Module was within a ParallelTable where 8 kernels were running at once. Tack on the (relatively) large number of iterations, and this was a breeding ground for lots of memory leaks due to the bug with Module.

Answer 1

Since you are using Module extensively, I think you may be interested in knowing this bug with non-deleting temporary Module variables.

Example (non-deleting unlinked temporary variables with their definitions):

In[1]:= $HistoryLength=0;
a[b_]:=Module[{c,d},d:=9;d/;b===1];
Length@Names[$Context<>"*"]

Out[3]= 6

In[4]:= lst=Table[a[1],{1000}];
Length@Names[$Context<>"*"]

Out[5]= 1007

In[6]:= lst=.
Length@Names[$Context<>"*"]

Out[7]= 1007

In[8]:= Definition@d$999

Out[8]= Attributes[d$999]={Temporary}

d$999:=9

Note that in the above code I set $HistoryLength = 0; to stress this buggy behavior of Module. If you do not do this, temporary variables can still be linked from history variables (In and Out) and will not be removed with their definitions due to this reason in more broad set of cases (it is not a bug but a feature, as Leonid mentioned).

UPDATE: Just for the record. There is another old bug with non-deleting unreferenced Module variables after Part assignments to them in v.5.2 which is not completely fixed even in version 7.0.1:

In[1]:= $HistoryLength=0;$Version
Module[{L=Array[0&,10^7]},L[[#]]++&/@Range[100];];
Names["L$*"]
ByteCount@Symbol@#&/@Names["L$*"]
Out[1]= 7.0 for Microsoft Windows (32-bit) (February 18, 2009)
Out[3]= {L$111}
Out[4]= {40000084}