[R] " cannot allocate vector of length 1072693248"

[David L. Van Brunt, Ph.D.]

Well, I've done everything I can think of the make the code more efficient,
but it seems (if I read this error message correctly) that I'm running out
of memory on what should be small data set.

Here's the sequence:

A vector of 30 possible identifiers
For each value, query a MySQL database to pull in 80 or so records
Run a few different random Forests on those data
Print the results as I go
"rm()" all the objects created in the loop, including all the old data
Next value, to repeat for each identifier.


Round the 3rd time through the loop, I get kicked out with:

"Error in as.vector(data) : cannot allocate vector of length 1072693248"

This is on Mac OS X, which is UNIX-based (from freeBSD, as I understand it),
so I haven't set anything special with the memory at startup. But then, I
only have 80 observations running through at a time, so it doesn't seem like
there should be a memory issue.

Any ideas?