Hello R-help, I am trying to import a large dataset from SPSS into R. The SPSS file is in .SAV format and is about 1GB in size. I use read.spss to import the file and get an error saying that I have run out of memory. I am on a MAC OS X 10.5 system with 4GB of RAM. Monitoring the R process tells me that R runs out of memory when reaching about 3GB of RAM so I suppose the remaining 1GB is used up by the OS.
Why would a 1GB SPSS file take up more than 3GB of memory in R? Is it perhaps because R is converting each SPSS column to a less memory- efficient data type? In general, what is the best strategy to load large datasets in R? Thanks! P.S. I exported the SPSS .SAV file to .CSV and tried importing the comma delimited file. Same results – the import was much slower but eventually I ran out of memory again... ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.