[R] limit on vector size allocation

[David Winsemius]

On Aug 29, 2012, at 10:23 AM, Siddeek, Shareef (DFG) wrote:

>    Hi,
> Can someone help me on the following problem?
> I have nearly 103,000 records with 22 variables (some are factors).  
> When I ran a stepwise glm on the data set, the R program stops with  
> an error message

Stepwise methods are statistically suspect. The fact that they are  
easy to do in SAS or SPSS is not evidence against the prior sentence.

> "Error: cannot allocate vector of size 171.3Mb."
>
> I have an R 2.12.0 on my PC (Windows XP) with a maximum 4Gb RAM.

You appear to have the machine resources to handle the problem, but  
probably have too much other "stuff" (running programs, open windows,  
etc)  in your system at this time that is occupying memory, this  
preventing R from having contiguous memory that can hold your data  
object. You should exit R, update R to a current version, restart your  
computer, do not run any other applications, ... restart R and redo  
this analysis.

-- 
David Winsemius, MD
Alameda, CA, USA