[R] R and Memory

[Edward McNeil]

Dear all,
This is my first post.
We have started to use R here and have also started teaching it to our PhD
students. Our unit will be the HQ for developing R throughout Thailand.

I would like some help with a problem we are having. We have one sample of
data that is quite large in fact - over 2 million records (ok ok it's more
like a population!). The data is stored in SPSS. The file is over 350Mb but
SPSS happily stores this much data. Now when I try to read it into R it
grunts and groans for a few seconds and then reports that there is not
enough memory (the computer has 250MB RAM). I have tried setting the memory
in the command line (--max-vsize and --max-mem-size) but all to no avail.

Any help would be muchly appreciated!

Edward McNeil (son of Don)
Epidemiology Unit
Faculty of Medicine
Prince of Songkhla University
Hat Yai  90110
THAILAND