> What does the 665 MB represent? Did you try doing a garbage > collection after you had done the import?
i didn't (sorry, R beginner) i followed your example and things look much better now, and object.size(x) returns: 219,167,604 which is about double the size of the same object in stata where it is: 104,882,604 this leaves quite some room for improvement, but at least i can now handle the data on my laptop... thanks for your quick response! edwin > I would suggest > > library("foreign") > x<-read.dta("mydata.dta") > gc() # possibly repeat gc() to lower the thresholds > object.size(x) # the actual storage (in bytes) allocated to this object > save(x, file = "mydata.rda", compress = TRUE) > > After that you can start a new session and use > > load("mydata.rda") > > to obtain a copy of the data set without the storage overhead incurred > by the stata -> R conversion. > > P.S. As described in the help page for object.size, the returned value > is more properly described as an estimate of the object size because > sometimes it is difficult to determine the object size accurately. > ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html