[R] Cleaning up memory in R

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 5/14/2008 3:59 PM, Anh Tran wrote:
> I'm trying to work on a large dataset and after each segment of run, I need
> a command to flush the memory. I tried gc() and rm(list=ls()) but they don't
> seem to help. gc() does not do anything beside showing the memory usage.

How do you know it does nothing?  R won't normally release memory to the 
OS, but it is still freed to be reused internally in R.

On the other hand, if you still have references to the variables, then 
gc() really will do nothing.

Duncan Murdoch

> I'm using the package BSgenome from BioC.
> 
> Thanks a bunch
>