[R] data usage

[Edwin Leuven]

> What does the 665 MB represent?  Did you try doing a garbage
> collection after you had done the import?

i didn't (sorry, R beginner)

i followed your example and things look much better now, and
object.size(x) returns:

219,167,604

which is about double the size of the same object in stata where it 
is:

104,882,604

this leaves quite some room for improvement, but at least i can 
now handle the data on my laptop...

thanks for your quick response! edwin


> I would suggest
> 
> library("foreign")
> x<-read.dta("mydata.dta")
> gc()              # possibly repeat gc() to lower the thresholds
> object.size(x)    # the actual storage (in bytes) allocated to this object
> save(x, file = "mydata.rda", compress = TRUE)
> 
> After that you can start a new session and use
> 
> load("mydata.rda")
> 
> to obtain a copy of the data set without the storage overhead incurred
> by the stata -> R conversion.
> 
> P.S. As described in the help page for object.size, the returned value
> is more properly described as an estimate of the object size because
> sometimes it is difficult to determine the object size accurately.
>