In help(gc) I read, "...the primary purpose of calling 'gc' is for the
report on memory usage".
What memory usage does gc() report? And more importantly, which memory
uses does it NOT report? Because I see one answer from gc():
used (Mb) gc trigger (Mb) max used (Mb)
Ncells 14875922 794.5 21754962 1161.9 17854776 953.6
Vcells 59905567 457.1 84428913 644.2 72715009 554.8
(That's about 1.5g max used, 1.8g trigger.)
And a different answer from an OS utility, 'top':
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
6210 brech 20 0 18.2g 7.2g 2612 S 1 93.4 16:26.73 R
So the R process is holding on to 18.2g memory, but it only seems to have
accout of 1.5g or so.
Where is the rest?
I tried searching the archives, and found answers like "just buy more RAM".
Which doesn't exactly answer my question. And come on, 18g is pretty big;
sure it doesn't fit in my RAM (only 7.2g are in), but that's beside the
point.
The huge memory demand is specific to R version 2.15.3 Patched (2013-03-13
r62500) -- "Security Blanket". The same test runs without issues under R
version 2.15.1 beta (2012-06-11 r59557) -- "Roasted Marshmallows".
I appreciate any insights you can share into R's memory management, and
gc() in particular.
/Christian
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