[R] Memory issues on a 64-bit debian system (quantreg)

[Jonathan Greenberg]

Rers:

    I installed R 2.9.0 from the Debian package manager on our amd64 
system that currently has 6GB of RAM -- my first question is whether 
this installation is a true 64-bit installation (should R have access to 
 > 4GB of RAM?)  I suspect so, because I was running an rqss() (package 
quantreg, installed via install.packages() -- I noticed it required a 
compilation of the source) and watched the memory usage spike to 4.9GB 
(my input data contains > 500,000 samples).

    With this said, after 30 mins or so of processing, I got the 
following error:

tahoe_rq <- 
rqss(ltbmu_4_stemsha_30m_exp.img~qss(ltbmu_eto_annual_mm.img),tau=.99,data=boundary_data)
Error: cannot allocate vector of size 1.5 Gb

    The dataset is a bit big (300mb or so), so I'm not providing it 
unless necessary to solve this memory problem.

    Thoughts?  Do I need to compile either the main R "by hand" or the 
quantreg package?

--j