[R] Garbage collection: RW1041

[Laurens Leerink]

Have searched through the archives but have been unable to find any related
issues - hopefully I'm not bringing up an old topic.

Am using RW1041 on a Windows NT on a machine with 1Gb of memory.  Have a
function doit() that reads in a chunk of data using readBin, performs a
regression, saves out coeffs and then returns.  When using Rgui with the
default memory limit of 256Mb I'm able to call this function twice before
running out of memory. After the allocation fails the GC is called & everything
is freed, ie we end up with the same memory as before.  Here is an example:

> gc()
         used (Mb) gc trigger (Mb)
Ncells 217415  5.9     467875 12.5
Vcells  63668  0.5     786432  6.0
> doit()
> gc()
          used (Mb) gc trigger  (Mb)
Ncells  342932  9.2     667722  17.9
Vcells 7966401 60.8   14760173 112.7
> doit()
> gc()
           used  (Mb) gc trigger  (Mb)
Ncells   468373  12.6     818163  21.9
Vcells 15869121 121.1   22798845 174.0
> doit()
Error: cannot allocate vector of size 3750 Kb
In addition: Warning message: 
Reached total allocation of 256Mb: see help(memory.size) 
> gc()
         used (Mb) gc trigger  (Mb)
Ncells 217515  5.9     787219  21.1
Vcells  63724  0.5   23990430 183.1
> 

Have increased memory size to 768Mb, but it just takes a few more iterations to
fail.  Got excited after reading the gctorture() documentation, so inserted a
few lines

    gctorture(on = TRUE)
    allocate some memory
    gctorture(on = FALSE)

hoping to trigger a GC but with varied success - the Vcell usage drops but only
slightly, so we seem to trigger a partial GC.  Usually fails on the next call
to "doit".

Have messed around with a few other cheats, eg using gc() to determine where
the trigger level is, then allocating and then deleting object(s) [one large
object or several smaller ones] so that we end up above the trigger level but
below the memory limits - limited success but nothing beyond adding one or two
more iterations.

Any advice/tips/cheats would be appreciated.

Regards,
Laurens Leerink

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