NetLogo BehaviorSpace memory size constraint

Question

In my model I'm using behaviour space to carry out a number of runs, with variables changing for each run and the output being stored in a *.csv for later analysis. The model runs fine for the first few iterations, but quickly slows as the data grows. My questions is will file-flush when used in behaviour space help this? Or is there a way around it?

Cheers

Simon

Answer 1

Make sure you are using table format output and spreadsheet format is disabled. At http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/docs/behaviorspace.html we read:

Note however that spreadsheet data is not written to the results file until the experiment finishes. Since spreadsheet data is stored in memory until the experiment is done, very large experiments could run out of memory. So you should disable spreadsheet output unless you really want it.

Note also:

doing runs in parallel will multiply the experiment's memory requirements accordingly. You may need to increase NetLogo's memory ceiling (see this FAQ entry).

where the linked FAQ entry is http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/docs/faq.html#howbig

Using file-flush will not help. It flushes any buffered data to disk, but only for a file you opened yourself with file-open, and anyway, the buffer associated with a file is fixed-size, not something that grows over time. file-flush is really only useful if you're reading from the same file from another process during a run.