[Rd] R Configuration Variable: Maximum Memory Allocation per R Instance

[Jeroen Ooms]

On Sun, Sep 17, 2017 at 12:39 AM, Juan Telleria <jtelleriar at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear R Developers,
>
> In the same way that MySQL/MariaDB's Engine InnoDB or MyISAM/Aria have the
> innodb_buffer_pool_size or the key_buffer_size for setting the maximum
> amount of RAM which can be used by a Server Instance.

Memory is not controlled by R itself because packages may malloc()
directly. However most operating systems have features to limit
resources of a given process. The CRAN package 'unix' has wrappers for
posix setrlimit [1] e.g. unix::rlimit_as() limits address space. This
works pretty well, however I found that the way memory is managed and
counted varies a lot per OS and malloc implementation.

You can also set rlimits on a single evaluation via the rlimit
parameter in sys::eval_safe().


[1] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/getrlimit.html