[R] Memory Problems

[Martyn Plummer]

On 19-Nov-99 Peter Dalgaard BSA wrote:
> Joanna Mills <millsje at mscs.dal.ca> writes:
> 
>> I have an R program which basically reads in data. It then
>> calls a  C program which performs numerical integration until converging
>>  to a solution.  The result is then passed back from C to R.
>> Unfortunately, when running this program, the virtual
>> memory associated with it explodes -> 2GIG!. Does anyone know what might
>> be causing this or can suggest possiblie ways to debug?
>
> Sounds as if the C routine is allocating memory and not freeing it?
> 
> You may want to check up on R_alloc (now where did we document that? I
> can find various hints in help(Memory), help(dyn.load), and help(.C),
> and in the R-external that will be in the upcoming release, but
> nothing really coherent.)

There is some documentation of R_alloc in the source file
src/main/memory.c which was enough to get me started.

The nice thing about R_alloc is that memory is freed automatically by the
.C interface if you forget to do it. Even better, you can use the error()
function to exit gracefully from your C code when there is a problem,
and the R_alloc'ed memory will also be freed. I don't think this is documented.

Martyn
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