Maximum phylip.dist that mothur can load

Commands in mothur
1

Hi all,

has anyone experienced a failure of generating phylogenetic tree if the phylip.dist file is larger than certain GB?

I’m trying to clearcut a phylip.dist file which is larger than 8GB and it kepting crashing when mothur proceeded to the clearcut step following SOP. other phylip.dist files of my data worked just fine, which are 3.5GB, 2.7GB for instance. but not for two files larger than 8GB.

My RAM is 8GB which i’m wondering if it’s the reason that mothur can only load file smaller than the RAM of the PC.

Thanks in advance!

2

If your distance matrix is more than 8 GB and you have 8 GB of RAM you are effectively trying to put water from a bucket into a cup. You need more RAM or forego building a tree. FWIW, we rarely/never see a difference between using the phylogenetic methods and bin-based metrics.

Pat