BLAST+ memory hog with subject FASTA and XML output
Peter Cock · 2012
We noticed a major memory problem running NCBI BLAST+ with XML output using a FASTA subject (consuming loads of swap space then getting killed). This doesn't happen with tabular output, nor if using a BLAST database: Memory and CPU usage (until killed by OS) The screenshots are from the cluster monitoring tool Ganglia, the horizontal red lines show the machine's physical limits (here 4 CPUs and 8 GB of RAM). This example is using BLAST+