openLCA not releasing memory after error

Question

When I get the error that I have run out of memory for a calculation, it does not seem that openLCA is purging the memory so it means I need to close an re-open the program before trying anything else. Since openLCA depends so much on memory, I am surprised that there is not an instruction to release the memory when any error is encountered.

Using -v 1.10.3

Answer 1

openLCA has a "garbage collection" which frees memory that is identified to be not needed any more, this is executed in periods where openLCA is not busy.

"I am surprised that there is not an instruction to release the memory when any error is encountered" - this should not happen regularly, so therefore it is probably not needed to have a special menu item or so for cleaning the memory (if this is your point) - if it happens, it it indeed best to simply restart openLCA.

Comments

I see, thank you for the clarification - for APOS ecoivent 3.7.1, 8 GB is indeed a bit small, for a full analysis with data quality assessment. Garbage collection is a Java feature. I can tell that in upcoming openLCA 2, memory demands will be much (much..) smaller, but for now, you will ideally have more than 8 GB memory allocated (like, 12 GB)