[R] "cannot allocate vector of size ..." in RHLE5 PAE kernel

[Mauricio Zambrano]

Dear R community,

I'm running R 32 bits in a 64-bits machine (with 16Gb of Ram) using a
PAE kernel, as you can see here:

$ uname -a
Linux mymachine 2.6.18-238.el5PAE #1 SMP Sun Dec 19 14:42:44 EST 2010
i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux


When I try to create a large matrix ( Q.obs <- matrix(NA, nrow=6940,
ncol=9000) ), I got the following error:


> Error: cannot allocate vector of size 238.3 Mb


However, the amount of free memory in my machine seems to be much
larger than this:

system("free")
\             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:      12466236    6354116    6112120          0      67596    2107556
-/+ buffers/cache:    4178964    8287272
Swap:     12582904          0   12582904


I tried to increase the memory limit available for R by using:

$ R --min-vsize=10M --max-vsize=5000M --min-nsize=500k --max-nsize=5000M


but it didn't work.


Any hint about how can I get R using all the memory available in the machine ?


Thanks in advance,

Mauricio

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