[R] Question about Error due to memory allocation issue

[Jeannette Wicks-Lim]

Hi, 

I'm new to using R and I'm having problems in trying to do some quantile 
regressions with the package quantreg. When I try to use rq [specifically, I 
type in: rq(lnwagehr~lnmin1 +  lncpi +  ue03 + ue35 + ue57 + ue79, tau=.05, 
data=mydata, weights=pworwgt, method="fn", na.omit) ] , the computer churns for 
about 15 minutes and then spits out the following error message:

Error: cannot allocate vector of size 109035 Kb

I'm not sure what it going on but here is some (possibly) relevant info:

-My computer has 512Mb of memory
-My data set was originally in Stata and I read it into R using the package 
foreign
-My data set is VERY LARGE: about 1.4 million obs. The data set was 90Mb in 
Stata. The model I've tried to evaluate only has 5 variables, but I'd like to 
expand this to about 43 (I have lots of state and year dummies). 

I have tried using the command: memory.size(max=TRUE):
> memory.size(max=TRUE)
[1] 2076487680

but I then get (after submitting another rq command):

Error: cannot allocate vector of size 76324 Kb

Thanks very much for any help you can provide!

Jeannette Wicks-Lim
Department of Economics
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Amherst, MA 01003