[Rd] Need for garbage collection after creating object

[Iago Mosqueira]

Hello,

After experiencing some difficulties with large arrays, I was surprised 
to see the apparent need for class to gc() after creating fairly large 
arrays. For example, calling

a<-array(2, dim=c(10,10,10,10,10,100))

makes the memory usage of a fresh session of R jump from 13.8 Mb to 
166.4 Mb. A call to gc() brought it down to 90.8 Mb,

 > gc()
            used (Mb) gc trigger  (Mb) max used  (Mb)
Ncells   132619  3.6     350000   9.4   350000   9.4
Vcells 10086440 77.0   21335887 162.8 20086792 153.3

as expected by

 > object.size(a)

[1] 80000136

Do I need to call gc() after creating every large array, or can I setup 
the system to do this more often or efficiently?

Thanks very much,


Iago


$platform
[1] "i686-pc-linux-gnu"
$version.string
[1] "R version 2.6.1 (2007-11-26)"