Octave memory issues and workaround

I had an Octave script which was reading data from files into a variable, doing some processing, then reading some different data into the same variable, and so on. For many hundreds of MB of data, using the load function. But Octave was running out of memory, and finally I had to
killall -9 octave-gui

The workaround was to process part of the data, save the intermediate data to file, exit Octave, reload Octave, resume processing, and so on. Painful, but it worked.