[R] Memory usage decreases drastically after save workspace, quit, restart, load workspace

[Klaus Thul]

Dear all,

I have the following problem:

  - I have written a program in R which runs out of physical memory  
on my MacBook Pro with 1.5 GB RAM

  - The memory usage is much higher then I would expect from the  
actual data in my global environment

  - When I save the workspace, quit R, restart R and load the  
workspace again, memory usage is much less then before
    (~50 MB instead of ~1.5 GB), although nothing seems to be missing.

  - It doesn't seem to be possible to reduce the amount of memory  
used by calling gc()

  - the behavior is independent of if I use R in command line or from  
GUI, so I can exclude a problem of the Mac GUI

Any suggestions what the problem might be or how I could debug this?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Best regards,
Klaus


platform       i386-apple-darwin8.6.1
arch           i386
os             darwin8.6.1
system         i386, darwin8.6.1
status
major          2
minor          3.1
year           2006
month          06
day            01
svn rev        38247
language       R
version.string Version 2.3.1 (2006-06-01)