Trimmomatic memory use

[yip]

I assume that Trimmomatic processes the reads sequentially, so I don't understand why a run with paired-end fastq input could take >10GB of memory easily. Does anyone know what I am missing?

I'm using trimmomatic-0.36 with 4 threads for a job. The input fastq files are about 4GB in size each.

Thank you!
yip

[NGSMicro]

I don't know for certain, but it could be that trimmomatic is opening 4 of the files at a time, as it has 4 threads working.

[yip]

Thank you for your comments. I can understand if multi-threading results in more I/O, but why would the run be so memory-hungry?
Next time I could try running my command single-threaded to see whether it makes a difference.

I don't know for certain, but it could be that trimmomatic is opening 4 of the files at a time, as it has 4 threads working.