AW: [R] Out of memory

[ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk]

On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Nikolaus Hansen wrote:

> But you did not comment all the reasonable commands I typed in
(Andy added on another one) without getting a reasonable response from R.
Why not? Thus it seemed to me that you would expect and accept that
kind of behaviour of R: E.g. loading some data into memory which exceed
the recent memory size will result in refusing any further command
(more precise: getting a prompt and an invariable response to any
typed command). This is not exactly helpful...

Would you prefer the process to be terminated?  You used up all the
resources allocated to R.  None could be freed by garbage collection.
What was R supposed to do?  There was no memory left to do anything else
in.

I think this circumstance is very rare (normally you get enough memory
back to do something).  I would prefer it to allowing R to take over all
the VM on a computer, when you probably need to reboot. Those who have not
seen this happen on a departmental server (say) should consider themselves
fortunate.  (It was open to you to set any limit you like if you prefer
this behaviour.)

-- 
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

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