[R] memory problem; Error: cannot allocate vector of size 915.5 Mb

David Winsemius dwinsemius at comcast.net
Mon Aug 1 17:22:16 CEST 2011


On Aug 1, 2011, at 3:04 AM, Dimitris.Kapetanakis wrote:

> Thanks a lot for the help.
>
> Actually, I am using a mac which (R for Mac OS X GUI 1.40-devel  
> Leopard
> build 32-bit (5751)) but I think I can find access on windows 7 64- 
> bit.

I don't think that was what Holtman was advising. You just need more  
available  memory, no need to use Win7. The Mac platform has been 64- 
bit capable longer than the Windoze OS, anyway. The way you get there  
might be as simple as rebooting, not starting any other applications,  
and re-running your code. Success depends upon how much addressable  
memory you have, which you did not state. All of the stuff below is  
immaterial to these considerations.

> What
> I am trying to do is a maximization through grid search (because I  
> am not
> sure that any of the optim() methods works sufficiently to my case,  
> at least
> all of them provide quite different results), the reason that I want  
> the
> optimizing is because I want to use it for a Monte Carlo analysis for
> Smoothed Maximum Score estimator, and for that reason I want the
> optimization to be the most efficient possible, but given that I am  
> kind of
> amateur on R and on programming in general, I doubt that I can do that
> sufficiently.

Your code ran without problem on my Mac running Leopard using an R64  
GUI session with 32 GB RAM (R.app GUI 1.41 (5866)).

 > str(G.search)
  num [1:40000000, 1:3] 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...

I have no idea whether it produced meaningful results, but a 120  
million item matrix is not a problem with enough physical memory. It's  
only around a Gig. Your error indicated a problem with allocating  
915.5 Mb. That should be possible (although borderline) in 4GB Mac  
running 32 bit R. (32 bit R is more memory efficient when working with  
physical memory of 4 GB or less because the pointer size is smaller.)

-- 
david.

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> Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>


David Winsemius, MD
West Hartford, CT



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