If you don't care about execution time, increasing your swap size from 100MB to a couple of GB will triple the amount of available memory. Projecting your current code efficiency (1 GB or RAM needed to process 16 MB of data), you should be able to process up to 48 MB of data at once.

Unless your data processing algorithm is really memory bound, simply writing better code could vastly reduce your memory requirements.

If you don't care about execution time, increasing your swap size from 100MB to a couple of GB will triple the amount of available memory. Projecting your current code efficiency (1 GB or RAM needed to process 16 MB of data), you should be able to process up to 48 MB of data at once.

sudo dphys-swapfile swapoff
echo 'CONF_SWAPSIZE=2048'|sudo tee /etc/dphys-swapfile
sudo dphys-swapfile swapon

Unless your data processing algorithm is really memory bound, simply writing better code could vastly reduce your memory requirements.