[R] Keeping memory usage low for a big script

Duncan Murdoch murdoch at stats.uwo.ca
Thu Jul 14 15:57:27 CEST 2005


On 7/14/2005 9:46 AM, Ken Termiso wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've got a script that I run on several computers, some with much less ram 
> than others, and I would like to try and keep the memory usage as low as 
> possible. The script creates variables to store intermediate results of 
> calculations, and then at the end writes a text file with the results of the 
> calculations.
> 
> Is a quick and dirty way to accomplish this to use rm() to delete objects no 
> longer in use, and then run gc()? ...or is there a better way?

Using rm() is good.  gc() will run automatically as needed; the main 
reason to run it yourself is just to make calculation timings more 
reproducible.  It will also affect memory fragmentation, most likely 
beneficially, but not necessarily...

Duncan Murdoch




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