Greetings all, First of all, thanks to all of you for creating such a useful, powerful program.
I regularly work with very large datasets (several GB) in R in 64-bit Fedora 8 (details below). I'm lucky to have 16GB RAM available. However if I am not careful and load too much into R's memory, I can crash the whole system. There does not seem to be a check in place that will stop R from trying to allocate all available memory (including swap space). I have system status plots in my task bar, which I can watch to see when all the ram is taken and R then reserves all the swap space. If I don't kill the R process before the swap hits 100%, it will freeze the machine. I don't know if this is an R problem or a Fedora problem (I suppose the kernal should be killing R before it crashes, but shouldn't R stop before it takes all the memory?). To replicate this behavior, I can crash the system by allocating more and more memory in R: v1=matrix(nrow=1e5,ncol=1e4) v2=matrix(nrow=1e5,ncol=1e4) v3=matrix(nrow=1e5,ncol=1e4) v4=matrix(nrow=1e5,ncol=1e4) etc. until R claims all RAM and swap space, and crashes the machine. If I try this on a windows machine eventually the allocation fails with an error in R, " Error: cannot allocate vector of size XX MB". This is much preferable to crashing the whole system. Why doesn't this happen in Linux? Is there some setting that will prevent this? I've looked though the archives and not found a similar problem. Thanks for any help. Adam The facts: > sessionInfo() R version 2.8.0 (2008-10-20) x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu locale: LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8;LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8;LC_MONETARY=C;LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8;LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8;LC_NAME=C;LC_ADDRESS=C;LC_TELEPHONE=C;LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8;LC_IDENTIFICATION=C attached base packages: [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base > version _ platform x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu arch x86_64 os linux-gnu system x86_64, linux-gnu status major 2 minor 8.0 year 2008 month 10 day 20 svn rev 46754 language R version.string R version 2.8.0 (2008-10-20) [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ 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.