[R] Do environments make copies?

I am using environments to avoid making copies (by keeping references). But it seems like there is a hidden copy going on somewhere - for example in the code fragment below, I am creating a reference to "y" (of size 500MB) and storing the reference in object "data". But when I save "data" and the

[R] Memory Fragmentation in R

I have a data set of roughly 700MB which during processing grows up to 2G ( I'm using a 4G linux box). After the work is done I clean up (rm()) and the state is returned to 700MB. Yet I find I cannot run the same routine again as it claims to not be able to allocate memory even though gcinfo()

[R] Handling large data sets via scan()

I'm trying to read in datasets with roughly 150,000 rows and 600 features. I wrote a function using scan() to read it in (I have a 4GB linux machine) and it works like a charm. Unfortunately, converting the scanned list into a datafame using as.data.frame() causes the memory usage to explode (it c