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The issue is quite simple, I have a bunch of figures being generated with tikz (which in turn calls gnuplot). In order to bypass the memory issue I externalised tikz, which was fine until I tried plotting a larger contour (around 100k points). I now get the "! TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [main memory size=10000000]." error even if I increase the main memory by editing texmf.cnf

I can plot the figure in question with gnuplot independently but would rather have it done within the latex file for easier editing.

Any suggestions?

Felipe
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    This is more like a workaround but worked for me, when I had a pretty similar problem with tikzexternalize. Try putting the tikz pictures in standalone documents and include the resulting pdf afterwards. – Rico Feb 28 '16 at 17:41
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    A path with 100k points is an heresy. – Paul Gaborit Feb 28 '16 at 23:39
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    100k is probably too much but have you tried to compile with luatex? Also consider to decimate the points, do you really need to plot 100k? – mirkom Feb 29 '16 at 01:47
  • @Rico thanks I'll try doing that, might end up being the best option – Felipe Feb 29 '16 at 20:07
  • @PaulGaborit ahah not sure why it's so hard for tikz, gnu plot takes a fraction of a second to make the plot! – Felipe Feb 29 '16 at 20:07
  • @mirkom I tried luatex but ended up with some errors and didn't really want to waste (even more) time figuring them out.. The plot does look nicer with all the points, but for now I just removed a few and used gnu plot's interpolation to make the contour look smoother – Felipe Feb 29 '16 at 20:07
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    @Felipe If you reduce your data to 10k points, I'm pretty sure that no one will see the difference and your PDF file will be ten times smaller. – Paul Gaborit Feb 29 '16 at 22:58
  • @PaulGaborit well I have to be smart about which points to remove as they are non-uniformly spaced, but yes I guess in the end you're right, it's just the extra step in between of reducing all the files that's quite inconvenient – Felipe Mar 02 '16 at 10:42

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there appears to be no direct solution, the options are: - either use luatex (see @PaulGaborit's reply) - reduce the number of points to be plotted (see @mirkom's reply) - generate the plot as a standalone file and then include the pdf (see @Rico's reply)

Felipe
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