[Rd] Hard memory limit of 16GB under Windows?

[Samuel Granjeaud IR/Inserm]

Hi Tomas,

Many thanks for your answer.

Here is a copy of a fresh session under RStudio, and after a copy under 
Rgui.
Strangely enough the result of memory.limit() is not the same. Without 
your question I would not have looked to RGui, being used to work with 
RStudio.

The value under RGui sounds to correspond to the total RAM of the 
computer. It makes me noticing that the value is in MB.

The value under Rstudio was so huge (1.759219e+13) that I just 
interpreted it as GB. But I was totally wrong. So in fact I don't know 
what it refers to. The documentation says "For a 64-bit versions of R 
under 64-bit Windows the limit is currently 8Tb.", but it looks like 
being 16TB, which my computer don't have of course.

I still have to understand why my colleague has a problem of memory 
allocation (cannot allocate vector of size 12.6 Gb).

Sorry for the wrong interpretation, but thanks for the help,
Samuel

--- RStudio

R version 3.6.3 (2020-02-29) -- "Holding the Windsock"
Copyright (C) 2020 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)

R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details.

R is a collaborative project with many contributors.
Type 'contributors()' for more information and
'citation()' on how to cite R or R packages in publications.

Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or
'help.start()' for an HTML browser interface to help.
Type 'q()' to quit R.

 > memory.limit()
[1] 1.759219e+13
 > sessionInfo()
R version 3.6.3 (2020-02-29)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 18363)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=French_France.1252  LC_CTYPE=French_France.1252    
LC_MONETARY=French_France.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=French_France.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_3.6.3 tools_3.6.3
 >

--- RGui

R version 3.6.3 (2020-02-29) -- "Holding the Windsock"
Copyright (C) 2020 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)

R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details.

R is a collaborative project with many contributors.
Type 'contributors()' for more information and
'citation()' on how to cite R or R packages in publications.

Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or
'help.start()' for an HTML browser interface to help.
Type 'q()' to quit R.

 > ls()
character(0)
 > memory.limit()
[1] 32627
 > sessionInfo()
R version 3.6.3 (2020-02-29)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 18363)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=French_France.1252  LC_CTYPE=French_France.1252    
LC_MONETARY=French_France.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C                   LC_TIME=French_France.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_3.6.3
 >