Loading or manipulating medium-sized volumes in 32-bit Slicer builds is not possible due to lack of available memory. Using 32-bit Win7 debug build a 100MB volume can be loaded only once, but then you cannot process it because there is not enough memory to store the output or load another similar volume. This amount of available memory is not enough even for basic evaluation purposes.

Workaround: move all CLI dlls from the ...\lib\Slicer3\Plugins\ to ...\bin (this forces Slicer to use the EXE interface for CLI modules)

Possible resolutions:

• Do not keep the CLI modules in memory (they consume about 500MB - Win7 32-bit, debug)
• Decrease the memory consumption of the Slicer core (currently about 650MB - Win7 32-bit, debug)
• Use 64-bit builds

There are a couple of options for not keeping the CLI modules in memory, but the simplest choice seems to be simply using the EXE interface instead of the DLL interface. This would be useful anyway, because it provides more memory for both Slicer and the CLI module, prevents Slicer crashes due to faulty modules. There might be a slight performance decrease in certain cases, so enabling the DLL interface could be an application option (but by default the DLL interface should be disabled).