---
title: "Choosing on prover time and discovering the memory wall"
description: "Selection is driven by wall-clock benchmarks, and the system then cannot run in the target environment at all because peak resident memory exceeds what a…"
type: "failure-mode"
url: "https://zkpick.com/proof-systems/failure-modes/choosing-on-prover-time-and-discovering-the-memory-wall/"
section: "01 Choosing a proof system"
authors:
  - "MarketComp"
publisher: "MarketComp"
version: "1.3"
updated: "2026-09-12"
license: "CC-BY-4.0"
json: "https://zkpick.com/data/proof-systems/failure-modes/choosing-on-prover-time-and-discovering-the-memory-wall.json"
---

*By MarketComp. Updated 2026-09-12. Version 1.3. CC BY 4.0.*

# Choosing on prover time and discovering the memory wall

Selection is driven by wall-clock benchmarks, and the system then cannot run in the target environment at all because peak resident memory exceeds what a browser, phone or affordable instance provides.

**Mitigation:** Measure peak memory on the actual target device early, and check whether the system supports streaming, chunked or continuation-based proving before committing.