[R] R 1.6.0 Solaris crash with xmalloc: out of virtual memory

[Don MacQueen]

	[some de-capitalization of *SXP done manually by mailing 
	 list maintainer ; the originally was caught as potential spam.  MM]

I have a little R program that crashes with the message
   xmalloc: out of virtual memory

The code has a repeat{} loop that watches the sizes of some files. 
When there's an increase it updates things by reading the last 65 
lines of each file, doing some calculations, and re-making a plot. 
After about 260 updates it crashes with the message
   xmalloc: out of virtual memory
and returns to the OS.

I inserted calls to gc() and memory.profile().

The value of CHARSXP from memory.profile() increases linearly at a 
rate of about 332.6 units per update, from 37178 just after R is 
started to 123319 shortly before it crashes. None of the others 
change much.

 From Rinternals.h,
   #define CHARSXP  9   /* "scalar" string type (internal only)*/
and it seems like this should give me a clue where to look in my code 
for something that keeps grabbing more memory, but I'm not getting it.

The values returned by gc() change (see below), but I don't know if 
the amount of change is significant.

Any suggestions would be most welcome.

Thanks
-Don

>  version
          _
platform sparc-sun-solaris2.7
arch     sparc
os       solaris2.7
system   sparc, solaris2.7
status
major    1
minor    6.0
year     2002
month    10
day      01
language R


----------------- At the beginning -------------
--- gc() returns:
          used (Mb) gc trigger (Mb)
Ncells 254150  6.8     467875 12.5
Vcells 408499  3.2     886807  6.8

--- memory.profile() returns:
NilSXP SymSXP ListSXP CloSXP EnvSXP PromSXP LangSXP SpecialSXP
      1   4919  128880   1440     13      18   63607         59

BUILTINSXP CHARSXP LGLSXP - - INTSXP REALSXP CPLXSXP STRSXP
        513   37178   1712 0 0    237    9047       8  10201

  DOTSXP ANYSXP VECSXP EXPRSXP - EXTPTRSXP WEAKREFSXP
  1           0    341       2 0         0          0

---------------- Just before the crash ------------
--- gc() returns:
          used (Mb) gc trigger (Mb)
Ncells 347539  9.3     597831 16.0
Vcells 566319  4.4    1103261  8.5

--- memory.profile() returns:
NilSXP SymSXP ListSXP CloSXP EnvSXP PromSXP LangSXP SpecialSXP
      1   4921  131330   1440     13      18   63607         59

BUILTINSXP CHARSXP LGLSXP - - INTSXP REALSXP CPLXSXP STRSXP
        513  123319   1726 0 0    275    9308       8  10613

DOTSXP ANYSXP VECSXP EXPRSXP - EXTPTRSXP WEAKREFSXP
      1      0    427       2 0         0          0

-- 
--------------------------------------
Don MacQueen
Environmental Protection Department
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Livermore, CA, USA
--------------------------------------

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