JSpecView Java Memory Issue

One of the puzzling issues we have run into while trying to extend our use of JSpecView overlays is that some of the overlays could be viewed on some computers but not others. For the computers that could not view the overlays, this could be corrected by removing a few of the spectra in the BLOCK file, suggesting a memory issue.

Khalid investigated this and not only confirmed that the problem was related to the Java memory setting but also found a program (SetJavaMemory) that fixed the problem for several of the computers with one of the troublesome overlays.

On the program's page is also a link to a Java Memory test. After running the program my memory increased from 67M to 187M.

Even with this increase, clearly there is a fairly low limit to the number of spectra that JSpecView can display simultaneously. Ideally, we would like JSpecView to dynamically display only a few of a large collection of spectra that would not have to be all held in Java memory at the same time.

One hack that would probably work in the short term is to use Excel VBA to easily generate BLOCK files from a large menu of JCAMP or CML files on disk. We could then use the standalone version of JSpecView to quickly look at the overlays from the BLOCK files.