Out of memory

I apologize for a basic question, but I hope someone can clarify this for me because searching the web did not uncover much.

I'm running Matlab on a Mac Pro with Mavericks, 64GB of RAM and over 900GB of free disk space. My computations involve pretty large matrices. I've noticed that whenever the amount of Virtual Memory approaches 128GB (in Activity Monitor), the system would pause the Matlab process and produce an "out of Application memory" message.

As far as I know, the only restriction on the amount of virtual memory should be the free disk space, and I have tons of it. But the OS does not want to increase virtual memory beyond twice the amount of the physical memory.

I wonder what's going on, is it a Matlab limitation?

Thanks

 

Thanks, I've seen that info and other solutions suggested by Mathworks (other data formats, disabling java, and sparse matrices), but it did not help. Most importantly, there is nothing in that article that can explain why virtual memory cannot go over 128GB. I have a 64-bit MATLAB, so according to them the limit is 8TB.

 

Thanks. This is weird. What does it even mean "it size is determined by the author of the app." ?

In any case, it's easy to calculate how much memory space my matrices require. If that number stays below 128GB, everything runs fine. Once it gets over 128GB, problems begin. Since there is only one account on that machine, it's hard to believe that there are processes running and consuming hundreds of GB of virtual memory.