checking available system memory?

[Josiah Carlson]

> I am doing linear algebra with large numarray. It is very efficient, but I
> have a small problem due to the size of my data. The dot product of a
> 10,000x3 double array with a 3x6,250,000 double array will consume 500GB of
> memory. I need to break the operations up into managable chunks, so I dont
> consume all the available memory and get a segmentation fault.
> 
> Its not a problem with numpy, I just need to intelligently slice up one of
> my arrays so my routine works within the available system resources. Are
> there any utilities that can query how much memory is available?

Unless you are running bigmem patches on linux, or the equivalent in
windows, you are limited to 2 gigs of memory per process.

How much memory do you really have?

 - Josiah