[R] memory

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 11 Jun 2001, Christian Hoffmann wrote:

> I am running R-1.2.3 on Unix:
>
>  >uname -a
> SunOS fluke 5.7 Generic_106541-12 sun4d sparc SUNW,SPARCserver-1000
>
> At startup using XEmacs I am stumped by:
>
> Error: an xdr real data read error occured
> Fatal error: unable to restore saved data
>  (remove .RData or increase memory)
>
> Process R exited abnormally with code 2 at Mon Jun 11 07:53:36 2001
>
> My .RData is 9'683'000 Bytes long.
>
> According to R FAQ the memory management should be automatically extending
> space for R.

Right.  The message is an old one: the most likely explanation is that
the .RData file is indeed corrupt.  We have seen that a few times,
on NFS-mounted discs on Linux, and it did seem to be network-related.

Another cause is a real memory limit, imposed by the OS rather than R (or
on Windows, via --max-mem-size).  This can happen when moving between
systems and limit/ulimit is in use.  (We have memory limits on user
processes on our compute servers, but not on users' desktop machines.) But
10Mb is not large.

> R version 1.2.0 introduces a new "generational" garbage collector, which
> will increase the memory available to R as needed. Hence, user intervention
> is no longer necessary for ensuring that enough memory is available.
>
> Since my project is still growing I will need more than 10MB in the future.
>
> What can I do apart from remove .RData ?
>
> How do I increase memory? The FAQ seems silent on this.

I think you need to change your way of working.  Saving everything in
one workspace after each session is too fragile.  If you have lots of
code or datasets, you can put them in a package.  If you have large
datasets, use a DBMS interface or binary connections or Rstreams to
read them.


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._