Philip,
I'm guessing you're specifying a small "fragment_bin_tol" value for the high-res ms/ms spectra. This causes Comet (not all capitalized) to use a ton of memory and you're just running out of memory.
On the following UWPR SEQUEST page, there's a table correlating a set of fragment_bin_tol settings vs. # input spectra vs. memory used:
These numbers apply to Comet as well.
To address the problem, run smaller searches i.e. run Comet on a subset of your input spectra. You can do this either with the "scan_range" parameter in the params file or simply invoke the searches such as
comet yourfile.mzXML:1-3000
comet yourfile.mzXML:3001-6000
comet yourfile.mzXML:6001-9000
Your going to get multiple outputs if you do this which will need to be handled. Splitting searches and managing results is something that some script should do for you; some day I'll throw some simple windows and linux example scripts on the Comet website for users.
Hopefully we'll have a workaround to address the memory use for these small fragment_bin_tol values in the semi-near future (thanks to Mike Hoopmann here who has implemented sparse matrix support in the code which I'm actively working with now).
- Jimmy