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

[Tae-Hoon Chung]

Hi, Eric.
It seems a little bit puzzling to me. Which Affymetrix chip do you use? 
The reason I'm asking this is that yesterday I was able to normalize 
150 HU-133A CEL files (containing 22283 probes) using R 1.9.1 in Mac OS 
X 10.3.3 with 1.5 GB memory. If your chip has more probes than this, 
then it must be understandable ...

On Jul 1, 2004, at 2:59 PM, Kort, Eric wrote:

> 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
>
>
> This email message, including any attachments, is for the 
> so...{{dropped}}
>
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Tae-Hoon Chung, Ph.D

Post-doctoral Research Fellow
Molecular Diagnostics and Target Validation Division
Translational Genomics Research Institute
1275 W Washington St, Tempe AZ 85281 USA
Phone: 602-343-8724