[R] Absolute ceiling on R's memory usage = 4 gigabytes?

[Liaw, Andy]

Did you compile R as 64-bit executable on the Irix?  If not, R will be
subjected to the 4GB limit of 32-bit systems.

Search the archive for `Opteron' and you'll see that the limit is not 4GB,
for 64-bit executables.

Andy

> From:  Kort, Eric
> 
> Hello.  By way of background, I am running out of memory when 
> attempting to normalize the data from 160 affymetrix 
> microarrays using justRMA (from the affy package).  This is 
> despite making 6 gigabytes of swap space available on our sgi 
> irix machine (which has 2 gigabytes of ram).  I have seen in 
> various discussions statements such as "you will need at 
> least 6 gigabytes of memory to normalize that many chips", 
> but my question is this:
> 
> I cannot set the memory limits of R (1.9.1) higher than 4 
> gigabytes as attempting to do so results in this message:
> 
> WARNING: --max-vsize=4098M=4098`M': too large and ignored
> 
> I experience this both on my windows box (on which I cannot 
> allocate more than 4 gigabytes of swap space anyway), and on 
> an the above mentioned sgi irix machine (on which I can).  In 
> view of that, I do not see what good it does to make > 4 
> gigabytes of ram+swap space available.  Does this mean 4 
> gigabytes is the absolute upper limit of R's memory 
> usage...or perhaps 8 gigabytes since you can set both the 
> stack and the heap size to 4 gigabytes?
> 
> Thanks,
> Eric
> 
> 
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> so...{{dropped}}
> 
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