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I've been trying to run r.sim.water on a 3 meter LiDAR-generated DEM I have, but keep getting G_malloc errors:

r.sim.water --verbose elevin=meterDEM.final@Sediment_Simulation dxin=centDEM.dx@Sediment_Simulation dyin=centDEM.dy@Sediment_Simulation depth=sim.water.depth disch=sim.water.discharge err=sim.water.error nwalk=1000

My error message:

ERROR: G_malloc: unable to allocate 43608 bytes at main.c:488

I'm running GRASS 6.4.2 on Windows. I've tried using a Ubuntu install on VirtualBox, and it fails out without any error at all. I tried ratcheting down the number of walkers (hence nwalk=1000), but that doesn't seem to help. I can't really think of what to try next.

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I suspect that your raster resolution and/or your computational region is too large. Check the output of "g.region -p" (in the menu Settings -> Region -> Display Region) to see how many raster cells you want to calculate. It likely exceeds the resources of the computer you are working with, at least that is commonly the problem.

Solution: set the computational region correctly.

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  • I suspected as much. Am I missing something that indicates the max region size this tool can operate on (given a certain amount of available ram)? I know the region is too large to run r.watershed in memory, but there is a flag to use virtual memory; I don't suppose there's anything like that for r.sim.water?
    – Nat
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 16:23
  • Perhaps 2GB is the limit if you have a 32bit machine. How many columns do you have in the "g.region -p" output?
    – markusN
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 20:48
  • 5451 columns, 6864 rows. I'm certain you're right about the memory; I'm going to try it again after downsampling the DEM to a different mapset, and accept your answer.
    – Nat
    Commented Apr 26, 2012 at 13:29
  • Glad you found it. FYI, for downsampling methods, see grass.osgeo.org/wiki/…
    – markusN
    Commented Apr 29, 2012 at 18:54

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