[R] [R 1.4] WARNING: --max-vsize=8000M : too large and ignored

[Thomas Lumley]

On Mon, 21 Jan 2002 Luca.Toldo at merck.de wrote:

> Why is there a limit on the amount of vector heap one can use ?
> I am operating on a 16GB SGI (O2000) machine.

The underlying reason is that nearly everyone uses R on machine that can't
address that much memory, so there isn't much motivation or ability to
extend the limits.

The more direct reason is that the memory manager indexes some things with
C ints, which are presumably still 32 bits on your machine. Extending it
isn't quite as simple as changing int to long everywhere, as the file
format requires 32bit types in some places, and R's integer type has to be
the same as C int and FORTRAN INTEGER.

Unless a user who needs to use large memories implements the changes it
may have to wait quite a while.

> Furthermore, is there any way to make R using multiple threads ?

Not at the moment (in the sense you probably want).  There is work being
done in that direction, and you can see some of the notes on
http://developer.r-project.org, but nothing is imminent.

	-thomas

Thomas Lumley			Asst. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle

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