LVS out of swap memory

I am running LVS on a large pixel array (16-mega pixel) which contains nothing but repeating the unit pixel. The pixel array is organized in a hierarchal systems consisting of cells that group increasing number of pixels (ie 1-pixel cell, 10-pixel cell made of 10 of 1-pixel cells, 100-pixel cell made of 10 of 10-pixel cells, 1000-pixel cell made of 10 of 100-pixel cells, and so on). Both the schematic and the layout have the same structure and pins. My problem now is that when I run LVS it eats up all the memory available on the system (4 GB, the maximum memory a 32-bit system can have) and LVS stops. I thought by structuring my design in a hierarchal way the runtime and memory requirements would be minimized. Am I doing something wrong so LVS would need > 4 GB of memory? Or this is the case for everyone who need to check large array designs (such as cameral pixel arrays or memory arrays)?