[Rd] example fails during R CMD CHECK but works interactively?

[Charles Determan]

Greetings,

I am collaborating with developing the bigmemory package and have run in to
a strange problem when we run R CMD CHECK.  For some reason that isn't
clear to us one of the examples crashes stating:

Error:  memory could not be allocated for instance of type big.matrix

You can see the output on the Travis CI page at
https://travis-ci.org/kaneplusplus/bigmemory where the error starts at line
1035.  This is completely reproducible when running
devtools::check(args='--as-cran') locally.  The part that is confusing is
that the calls work perfectly when called interactively.

Hadley comments on the 'check' page of his R packages website (
http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/check.html) regarding test failing following R CMD
check:

Occasionally you may have a problem where the tests pass when run
interactively with devtools::test(), but fail when in R CMD check. This
usually indicates that you’ve made a faulty assumption about the testing
environment, and it’s often hard to figure it out.

Any thoughts on how to troubleshoot this problem?  I have no idea what
assumption we could have made.

Regards,
Charles

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