byte-accuracy red, green, blue channels) = 27 bytes. More likely 28 bytes as colours are probably stored as 32-bit integers, allowing for an unused alpha channel.
28 * 800,000 equals roughly 22 megabytes, which is way down from 9 gigabytes. That's a 400 fold memory overhead, which is pretty hefty.
Grasshopper stores points as instances of classes, so on 64-bit systems it actually takes 64+64+3*8 = 152 bytes per point*, which adds up to 122MB, still way less than 9GB. It would be interesting to know where all the memory goes...
* Grasshopper points also store reference data, in case they come from the Rhino document. This data will not exist, but even so it will require 64-bits of storage.…
Added by David Rutten at 4:13pm on December 11, 2014
he sunPath component works. For example if you want to simulate the hours from 8 to 16 it means you want 8 hours from 8 to 9, from 9 to 10,.... from 15 to 16 (8 hours duration period) so you get from the sunPath component (using default timeStep 1) the 9 sun position/vectors 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 (in the image the yellow suns). The things is that if you ask for a smaller timeStep for example 3 = 20 mins then the additional sun position (in the image the orange suns) are added also after the time limit of h16 so probably when you don't want/need. I understand that when you input a time period there is the ambiguity if the hours are the just 9 (the 9 inputs) or the 8 hours included between pairs of hours, but I would make in a way that it is possible to chose if the extra timeStep after the last hour are added or not. Thank you for your comments.
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i mean, i want a slider that can do 3 sides, 4 sides, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. for the grids because I dont want to use a fixed grid shape such as square grid (4 sides only).