[R] Memory Management under Linux: Problems to allocate large amounts of data

[Dubravko Dolic]

Dear Group

I'm still trying to bring many data into R (see older postings). After solving some troubles with the database I do most of the work in MySQL. But still I could be nice to work on some data using R. Therefore I can use a dedicated Server with Gentoo Linux as OS hosting only R. This Server is a nice machine with two CPU and 4GB RAM which should do the job:

Dual Intel XEON 3.06 GHz
4 x 1 GB RAM PC2100 CL2
HP Proliant DL380-G3

I read the R-Online help on memory issues and the article on garbage collection from the R-News 01-2001 (Luke Tierney). Also the FAQ and some newsgroup postings were very helpful on understanding memory issues using R.

Now I try to read data from a database. The data I wanted to read consists of 158902553 rows and one field (column) and is of type bigint(20) in the database. I received the message that R could not allocate the 2048000 Kb (almost 2GB) sized vector. As I have 4BG of RAM I could not imagine why this happened. In my understanding R under Linux (32bit) should be able to use the full RAM. As there is not much space used by OS and R as such ("free" shows the use of app. 670 MB after dbSendQuery and fetch) there are 3GB to be occupied by R. Is that correct?

After that I started R by setting n/vsize explicitly

R --min-vsize=10M --max-vsize=3G --min-nsize=500k --max-nsize=100M

> mem.limits()
    nsize     vsize
104857600        NA

and received the same message.


A garbage collection delivered the following information:

> gc()
         used (Mb) gc trigger   (Mb) limit (Mb)  max used   (Mb)
Ncells 217234  5.9     500000   13.4       2800    500000   13.4
Vcells  87472  0.7  157650064 1202.8       3072 196695437 1500.7


Now I'm at a loss. Maybe anyone could give me a hint where I should read further or which Information can take me any further 





Dubravko Dolic
Statistical Analyst
Tel:      +49 (0)89-55 27 44 - 4630
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Email: dubravko.dolic at komdat.com
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