On Sat, 26 Aug 2006, Klaus Thul wrote: > Dear all, > > I have the following problem: > > - I have written a program in R which runs out of physical memory > on my MacBook Pro with 1.5 GB RAM
How does R know about physical memory on a virtual-memory OS? I presume the symptom is swapping by your OS, but how do you attribute that to R? > - The memory usage is much higher then I would expect from the > actual data in my global environment > > - When I save the workspace, quit R, restart R and load the > workspace again, memory usage is much less then before > (~50 MB instead of ~1.5 GB), although nothing seems to be missing. > > - It doesn't seem to be possible to reduce the amount of memory > used by calling gc() > > - the behavior is independent of if I use R in command line or from > GUI, so I can exclude a problem of the Mac GUI > > Any suggestions what the problem might be or how I could debug this? How are you measuring memory usage? If this is by gc(), note that lazyloading is one-way, and memory increases after you use a lazyloaded object in a session. This can be dramatic where datasets are involved. If you are asking the OS about memory usage, return of memory to the OS is a rather haphazard and OS-specific issue. On some OSes virtual memory is not actually reclaimed from applications until it is needed (or ever). It is certainly possible that something you are using has a memory leak, but valgrind has been used to plug those on the most-used parts of R. I at least need more precise indications of what you observed to be able to comment more. -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch 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.
