My guess would be that it's a matter of having swap space be a dedicated
partition or fixed-size file (Linux, usually) versus swapping to a regular
file that grows as needed (Windows and OS X, usually.) So if you
defragmented your drive and set Windows to have a fixedsize swap file, it
would probably behave more like your Linux machine.

Peter

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 10:14 PM, Spencer Graves <
spencer.graves@prodsyse.com> wrote:

> I computed "system.time(diag(30000))" with R 2.12.0 on Fedora 13 Linux
> with 4 GB RAM and with R 2.14.1 on Windows 7 with 8 GB RAM:
>
>
> Linux (4 GB RAM):  0, 0.21, 0.21 -- a fifth of a second
>
>
> Windows 7 (8 GB RAM):  11.37 7.47 93.19 -- over 1.5 minutes.  Moreover,
> during most of that time, I could not switch windows or get any response
> from the system.  When I first encountered this, I thought Windows was hung
> permanently and the only way out was a hard reset and reboot.
>
>
>      On both systems, diag(30000) generated, "Error:  cannot allocate
> vector of size ___ Gb", with "___" = 3.4 for Linux with 4 GB RAM and 6.7
> for Windows with 8 GB RAM.  Linux with half the RAM and an older version of
> R was done with this in 0.21 seconds.  Windows 7 went into suspension for
> over 93 seconds -- 1.5 minutes before giving an error message.
>
>
>       I don't know how easy this would be to fix under Windows, but I felt
> a need to report it.
>
>
>      Best Wishes,
>      Spencer
>
>
> --
> Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
> President and Chief Technology Officer
> Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
> 751 Emerson Ct.
> San José, CA 95126
> ph:  408-655-4567
> web:  www.structuremonitoring.com
>
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>

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