LocalNormalization process crashes

[sarg314]

I don't think this is a PixInsight problem, but I thought I would post it in case some one else using linux runs into it.  I was going through Mercieca's tutorial and got up to the LocalNormalization step.  The first time I ran it - with 29 light files - it crashed. The PI window just disappeared. I ran it again invoking PI from a terminal and saw this in the window after it stopped:

./PixInsight.sh: line 35:  5982 Killed      /opt/PixInsight/bin/./PixInsight

It didn't throw an exception, it was killed. So I looked in /var/log/syslog and saw this:
May 15 15:02:58 ralph kernel: [  589.493946] Out of memory: Kill process 2927 (PixInsight) score 898 or sacrifice child
May 15 15:02:58 ralph kernel: [  589.493982] Killed process 2927 (PixInsight) total-vm:13927400kB, anon-rss:7585060kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:12744kB
May 15 15:02:58 ralph kernel: [  589.812026] oom_reaper: reaped process 2927 (PixInsight), now anon-rss:0kB, file-rss:0kB, shmem-rss:12876kB

The oom killer killed it.  My system has 8GB of ram (which I used to think was a lot!).  The files are all .xisf files and each one is 289MB.  By trial and error I found it could process at most 3 files at a time.  I thought there might be bug in some other program using memory and not freeing it, so I rebooted the machine to start clean, but it still failed the same way if I try to process 4 or more files with LocalNormalization.

[pfile]

whats your swap situation? while performance might suck if the system is thrashing, maybe increasing the linux swap would at least prevent the out of memory condition?

rob

[sarg314]

My swap space is 2GB.  I don't remember for sure, but I think that was the default when I installed the system.  It's only 1/4 the size of the RAM which seems small to me.  Apparently I can add to it (I never dealt with this before - I'm not much of a system guy).  I guess I could put more RAM in the box too.

[pfile]

yeah you can add to it... i think you can even create a file with dd and then use the swapon command to swap to that file (vs. swapping onto a whole partition). you might even be able to create a sparse file with dd so the CPU doesn't have to spend 10 minutes writing 0s to a 4GB file or whatever. it's been a while since i did this so can't remember all the details.

rob