Tip of the day: mrStudio and memory usage

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 | Interviewing, Scripting

I was speaking to a friend the other day, and they told me something that I would like to share with you all. They had been editing a large MDD file in mrStudio. The MDD file was around 1 meg, and after a few hours of just editing and saving, no running the survey, mrStudio began to slow. Looking in task manager they noticed that studio was using 1.3 gig of memory. For obvious reasons they thought they’d better close studio and re-open it to clean the memory usage up, but studio crashed and they thought they had lost their last few changes.

You may or may not know, but when mrStudio fails to save a file, it creates an ivs file. These files can be opened up in notepad or something similar and you will see all your code , you can then copy and paste the changes out of the ivs file back into the mdd file and carry on working. Anyway back to the article, so my friend opened up the MDD again, made sure that the file saved correctly and then went to look at the task manager to see how much memory has been used. Memory was sitting at around 100mb, they then just did a save, nothing else, and watched the memory jump up by about 10mb, they did this a few times and sure enough the memory usage on studio, without making any changes, slowly increased.

They logged this issue with SPSS, and got a quick response back saying , “Just try minimizing the task manager and see what happens”, so this was done and sure enough, just them doing this, the memory usage of studio shot back down to around 30 mb. So the tip is ,

“If mrStudio is using a lot of memory while you edit things, start up task manager and then just minimize it , and you could find that a lot of memory is released back to your system”

Now , I have no idea why this would happen, and the more I think about it , I don’t see how this could be something SPSS has done. I have searched Google a bit, but found nothing that supports any of this, Do you have any thoughts on what is happening, If so please share them.