[R] Memory management on Windows (was Size of jpegs/pngs)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

I think this an issue about the amount of graphics memory.  You are asking 
for an image of about 17*2*3 = 102Mb, and you need more than that.

>From the help page:

      Windows imposes limits on the size of bitmaps: these are not
      documented in the SDK and may depend on the version of Windows. It
      seems that 'width' and 'height' are each limited to 2^15-1 and
      there is a 16Mb limit on the total amount of memory in Windows
      95/98/ME.

so I do wonder why you are surprised.

My laptop appears to be limited to about half your example with a 128Mb 
graphics card (and lots of other things going on).

On Sun, 2 Oct 2005 stgries at arcor.de wrote:

> Dear all
>
> I have trouble with setting the size for jpegs and pngs. I need to save 
> a dendrogram of 1000 words into a jpeg or png file. On one of my 
> computers, the following works just fine:
>
> bb<-agnes(aa, method="ward")
> jpeg("C:/Temp/test.txt", width=17000, height=2000)
> plot(bb)
> dev.off()
>
> On my main computer, however, this doesn't work:
>> jpeg("C:/Temp/test.txt", width=17000, height=2000)
> Error in jpeg("C:/Temp/test.txt", width = 17000, height = 2000) :
>        unable to start device devWindows
> In addition: Warning message:
> Unable to allocate bitmap
>
> This is a Windows XP Pro SP2 system, which is started with this chsort
>> R.version
>         _
> platform i386-pc-mingw32
> arch     i386
> os       mingw32
> system   i386, mingw32
> status
> major    2
> minor    1.1
> year     2005
> month    06
> day      20
> language R
>
> which is started with a shortcut.
> "C:\rw2011\bin\Rgui.exe --max-mem-size=1500M"
>
> I checked the web and the R-help pages, tried out the ppsize option, and 
> compared the options settings with those of the machine that works 
> (which actually runs R 2.0.1 of 15 Nov 2004), but couldn't come up with 
> an explanation. Any idea what I do wrong?

Did you read the help page?

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595