[GRASS-user] r.in.xyz memory error

[Ken]

I'm using r.in.xyz to import an ascii x/y/z file with about 2 million 
points.   While r.in.xyz is scanning data  I monitor it using "top" and 
I can see a VIRT memory size of 863m and the RES memory climbs fairly 
quickly up to that amount and then I get the following error:
ERROR: G_calloc: out of memory

I have 1GB physical ram on my system + 1GB swap space.   Is this 
expected behaviour for r.in.xyz? Any suggestions for getting it to run 
successfully within the ram constraints of my system?

Or, perhaps there's a better way to do what I'm trying to do?  I have a 
postgres table with 10 million x,y,z points (which will grow to about 
100m).  I want to perform queries to extract various regions of points 
and create raster layers in grass from those points.   Currently I'm 
writing my query results to an output file and then importing with 
r.in.xyz.   Is there a better way to do this which might solve my memory 
issue above?

Thanks!
Ken