[R] R + memory of objects

[Uwe Ligges]

I guess the numbers your report are what your OS shows you?

R runs garbage collection (which can be manually triggred by gc()) after 
certain fuzzy rules. So what you report below is not always the current 
required memory but what was allocated and not yet garbnage collected.

See ?object.size to get the memory consumption of objects.

Uwe Ligges





On 02.12.2011 16:17, Marc Jekel wrote:
> Dear R community,
>
> I am still struggling a bit on how R does memory allocation and how to
> optimize my code to minimize working memory load. Simon (thanks!) and
> others gave me a hint to use the command "gc()" to clean up memory which
> works quite nice but appears to me to be more like a "fix" to a problem.
>
> To give you an impression of what I am talking, here is a short code
> example + I will give rough measure (system track app) of my working
> memory needed for each computational step (R64bit latest version on WIN
> 7 64 bit system, 2 Cores, approx 4 GB Ram):
>
> ##########################
>
> # example 1:
>
> y= matrix(rep(1,50000000), nrow = 50000000/2 , ncol = 2)
>
> # used working memory increases from 1044 --> 1808 MB
>
> # (same command again, i.e.)
>
> y= matrix(rep(1,50000000), nrow = 50000000/2 , ncol = 2)
>
> # 1808 MB --> 2178 MB Why does memory increase?
>
> # (give the matrix column names)
>
> colnames(y) = c("col1", "col2")
>
> # 2178 MB --> 1781 MB Why does the size of an object decrease if I
> assign column labels?
>
> ###
>
> # example 2:
>
> y= matrix(rep(1,50000000), nrow = 50000000/2 , ncol = 2)
>
> 1016 --> 1780 MB
>
> y = data.frame(y)
>
> # increase from 1780 MB --> 3315 MB
>
> ##########################
>
> Why does it take so much extra memory to store this matrix as a data.frame?
>
> It is not the object per se (i.e. that data.frames need more memory)
> because if I use gc() memory size drops to 1387 MB. Does this mean that
> it may be more memory-efficient not to use any data.frames but matrices
> only? etc.
>
> This puzzles me a lot. From my experience these effects are also
> accentuated for larger objects.
>
> As an anecdotal comparison: I also used Stata in my last project due to
> these memory problems and I could do a lot of variable manipulations of
> the same (!) data with significant (I am talking about GB) less memory
> needed.
>
> Best,
>
> Marc
>
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