[Gmsh] Mesh with many volumes - memory problem

[Romain Quey]

Hi Gmsh developers, hi everyone,

I'm generating meshes with a lot of element sets (or "volumes");
actually, one element set for each element.  It turns out that Gmsh
uses much more memory than when there is only one element set (for the
same mesh).  Attached are examples of the same mesh made of 8807
elements, but with 1 or 8807 element sets.  The memory needs for
loading the meshes are:
- for 1 elset    : 35Mb RAM (leak 5Mb, non-leak 30Mb)
- for 1 elset/elt: 122Mb RAM (leak 92Mb, non-leak 30Mb)

As indicated above, the memory leak reported is much higher when there
are a lot of element sets (report by valgrind).

With a mesh made of 157352 elements, the difference becomes very high:
- 1 elset    :   84Mb RAM
- 1 elset/elt: 1600Mb RAM

Of course, this is annoying, and I think it is due to a memory leak in
Gmsh.

By the way, I'm generating such meshes with one element set for each
element because I want to assign one particular color to every element,
which is done through: "Color{R,G,B}{Volume{...};}" for each element.
Is there a simpler way?

Thanks for your great software,

Romain

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