[R] memory management

Bert Gunter gunter.berton at gene.com
Mon Feb 27 23:35:14 CET 2012


This appears to be the sort of query that (with apologies to other R
gurus) only Brian Ripley or Luke Tierney could figure out. R generally
passes by value into function calls (but not *always*), so often
multiple copies of objects are made during the course of calls. I
would speculate that this is what might be going on below -- maybe
even that's what you meant.

Just a guess on my part, of course, so treat accordingly.

-- Bert

On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 1:03 PM, Sam Steingold <sds at gnu.org> wrote:
> It appears that the intermediate data in functions is never GCed even
> after the return from the function call.
> R's RSS is 4 Gb (after a gc()) and
>
> sum(unlist(lapply(lapply(ls(),get),object.size)))
> [1] 1009496520
>
> (less than 1 GB)
>
> how do I figure out where the 3GB of uncollected garbage is hiding?
>
> --
> Sam Steingold (http://sds.podval.org/) on Ubuntu 11.10 (oneiric) X 11.0.11004000
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-- 

Bert Gunter
Genentech Nonclinical Biostatistics

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