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I had the case that I ran into TeX capacity exceeded several times when compiling a pgfplot with lots of data points on a machine with 4096 MB RAM.

Now I've tried to compile the very same file on a machine with 20 GB RAM and it worked completely flawless.

Is TeX Lives main memory size dependent of machines RAM, or is it just a software depending value?

Dave
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  • AFAIK it's a software-defined value, see also https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/7953 for example. – Dr. Manuel Kuehner Apr 14 '19 at 08:02
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    @Dr.ManuelKuehner: Thanks a lot - that's pretty interesting! What else could be the reason that it worked on a second machine without complaining about the memory size? – Dave Apr 14 '19 at 08:08
  • I do not know, maybe there is a command line option that shows the settings on each system and you can compare the results. I would look for "Tex Live Memory Settings", I found a German site that looks promising (https://forum.ubuntuusers.de/topic/texlive-memory-vergroessern/). – Dr. Manuel Kuehner Apr 14 '19 at 08:31
  • Does the compilation need the same memory on both systems? – Ulrike Fischer Apr 14 '19 at 08:44
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    show the end of the log for the two cases, in particular that will show the memory settings of the two installations, eg a successful run will say something like 95365 words of memory out of 5000000 – David Carlisle Apr 14 '19 at 08:50
  • The original TeX ran on batch machines with memory/class limits. Initex created a memory image after running all the standard macro definitions. This image was executable, but only using the memory it was created with (see also bigtex). – John Kormylo Apr 14 '19 at 17:47
  • @DavidCarlisle: Thanks a lot for this hint! On the "weak" machine: 5000000 words of memory out of 5000000 while on the "strong" machine: 4949357 words of memory out of 5000000. Why does the strong machine consume less memory for the exactly same file? – Dave Apr 15 '19 at 08:00
  • @Dave ooh so you only just scraped home on the successful run:-) If you add \listfiles and compare package versions then some package or other will be different and using a bit more memory and tip you over the limit. In any case you sould be able to increase main mem intexmf.cnf – David Carlisle Apr 15 '19 at 08:05

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