Debian - Increase LaTeX main memory size

May 27, 2017 Debian LaTeX

I want to increase the memory for Tex Live on my Debian operating system. The reason is the following error that I get after executing the command pdflatex.

Increase main memory size

The right texmf.cnf file on my Debian Jessie is /etc/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf. But as mentioned in this file, it is a generated file and should not be edited manually. It is recommended to edit the /etc/texmf/texmf.d/00debian.cnf file for example.

VARTEXFONTS=/tmp/texfonts
main_memory = 12000000
extra_mem_bot = 12000000
font_mem_size = 12000000
pool_size = 12000000
buf_size = 12000000

Afterwards we need to generate the /etc/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf file with the following command executed with super user permissions.

update-texmf

And distribute the new configuration with the following command again executed with super user permissions.

sudo texhash
texhash: Updating /usr/local/share/texmf/ls-R...
texhash: Updating /var/lib/texmf/ls-R-TEXLIVEDIST...
texhash: Updating /var/lib/texmf/ls-R-TEXMFMAIN...
texhash: Updating /var/lib/texmf/ls-R...
texhash: Done.

Hard coded memory limit

There seems to be and hard coded main memory limit that you should not cross. For me that was araound 12000000. As I tried 13000000 for example the following error occurred.