Does the Windows version of MAGMA have a memory limit?

Question

Sorry if this isn't the best place to ask support type MAGMA questions, but I haven't found a single forum or anything for MAGMA users to talk.

I have access to a copy of MAGMA which is running on a server at my school (the operating system is "Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise"). I've been told the server has 16GB of memory and there's no limit to how much a single user can use (I'm apparently usually the only person on this server). But for some reason I keep getting system errors from MAGMA any time it tries to request more than ~1400MB of memory.

Does anyone know how I can determine if this is an error in the way the server is set up or if this is an inherent limitation of MAGMA?

Answer 1

I contacted MAGMA and for the record:

Windows apparently did something weird with their definition of a "long" integer in the 64bit operating system, so MAGMA on Windows is only supported in 32bit. The maximum memory MAGMA can draw as a 32bit application is 1.3GB. As this is a system limit and not an internal limit GetMemoryLimit() will still return $0$.

The only solution is to run MAGMA in 64bit on either OSX or Linux.

Answer 2

MAGMA's memory limit is stored under the environmental variable MAGMA_MEMORY_LIMIT. You can view the value of this variable with GetMemoryLimit(), and you can set its value with SetMemoryLimit(n). If you want to remove the memory limit, use SetMemoryLimit(0). Of course, you will still be constrained by the memory limits of your system.

Note that in the student version of MAGMA, there is a soft memory limit of 150MB which you cannot modify.