the meaning of "split_batch"?

[Grassyue]

Hi, thank you for your sharing and sorry to bother you, i am a new guy in super-resolution, can you explain the meaning of "split_batch" in the code? thank you sooo much!

[Paper99]

Each batch will first split into N (depending on the value of split_batch) sub-batches before feeding to the network. The larger split_batch will lead to less GPU memory usage during training.

[Grassyue]

Thanks for your reply，but why not directly set the batch size to a small number? what is the difference?

[Paper99]

When you set a large batchsize, the option split_batch make it possible to update the parameters only once.

[DamperHa]

When I use the option split_batch, the accuracy was much worse on the test set, what is the reason for this?