Memory consumption of SNAP

Hi everybody,

working on a PC with 8 GB RAM and Windows 10 with the latest version of SNAP 5 and the latest version of SNAP 6 Preview I got the error messages

  • GC overhead limit exceeded
  • Cannot construct DataBuffer
    when I tried to calibrate (complex values or at least 2 output bands) data of a subswath of a SLC product in different configurations of SNAP (e.g. heap size of JVM of 3 GB up to 5.7 GB).
    The problem apparently depends on the size of input or output product, e.g. calibration of sigma0 alone works.
    In the task manager of Windows one can see that about 1 minute before an error pops up the cache-disk is 100% busy while the data disk is idle and memory consumption is between 96% and 100%.

There are several reports about this problem in the forum but I have not found a solution except more RAM for the PC.

My first workaround was the use of a Google compute engine with Linux and 26 GB RAM. This worked just fine.

Then I have done the same operations in a virtual machine (VirtualBox, 4,5 GB RAM) with Debian 9.2.1 (Stretch) and the actual SNAP 5 linux-version on my PC. It worked (but of course quite slow).

That’s puzzling and I would like to know:
What’s the cause of this difference of SNAP/Windows and SNAP/Linux?
Is there something like a configuration switch to enable the (successfull) memory management of SNAP/Linux for “small RAM” in SNAP/Windows?

Clarifying comments are welcome. Thanks in advance.

2 Likes

Doesn’t solve all problems but unpacking the S1 ZIP files before using them in SNAP saved some memory in many cases.

Thank You for Your comment but I only work with unzipped products in BEAM-DIMAP format.