[R] R 64-bit Windows isn't using much memory

[Joshua Wiley]

On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 8:46 PM,  <ericksonsm at aol.com> wrote:
>
>  I have a 9 GB RAM Windows Vista machine.
>
>  I installed the 64-bit version of R 2.11.1 for Windows from here:
>
> http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows64/base/
>
> I am running a program now in R. However, looking at Windows Task Manager, I see that Rgui.exe is only using 12% of CPU and 191,900K of memory. How do I max it out? I know the default memory limit is the amount of installed RAM, but it doesn't seem to be using it. I need my program to run faster.

The following is no doubt a great oversimplification.  I am sure
others will have much more to say.  R generally only runs on a single
core.  Assuming you have a quad core CPU with hyper threading turned
on, Windows Task Manager will show 8 logical cores.  100%/8 ~ 12.5% is
the max you can expect from R running on one core.  Given the small
amount of memory being used, I would hazard the guess that memory is
not what is slowing your program down.  Depending what you are doing,
there are some ways you can take advantage of multiple cores to speed
things up.  Here is a link to the CRAN task view on HPC with R
http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/HighPerformanceComputing.html .
Windows used to not work with many of these packages, but I think some
of that is starting to change.

Best Regards,

Josh

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-- 
Joshua Wiley
Ph.D. Student, Health Psychology
University of California, Los Angeles
http://www.joshuawiley.com/