[R] R memory and CPU requirements

[Thomas Lumley]

On Fri, 17 Oct 2003, Alexander Sirotkin [at Yahoo] wrote:

>
> I did study ANOVA and I do have enough observations.
> 200 was only a random sample of more then 5000 which I
> think should be enough. However, I'm afraid to even
> think about amount of RAM I will need with R to fit a
> model for this data.
>

The memory requirements depend on the size of the design matrix. If the
number of columns in the design matrix doesn't increase then 5000
observations won't be much worse.  If it does increase then you have the
same problem of sparseness even with 5000 observations.

There must be *something* strange about your model. I routinely fit
regression models with 6000 observations and a dozen or so variables in R,
in much less than 2Gb of RAM.

	-thomas

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