[R] memory management

[luke-tierney at uiowa.edu]

On Wed, 29 Feb 2012, Sam Steingold wrote:

>> * Milan Bouchet-Valat <anyvzvyna at pyho.se> [2012-02-29 18:18:50 +0100]:
>>
>> I think you're simply hitting a (terrible) OS limitation. Linux is
>> very often not able to reclaim the memory R has used because it's
>> fragmented.  The OS can only get the pages back if nothing is above
>> them, and most of the time there is data after the object you
>> remove. I'm not able to give you a more precise explanation, but
>> that's apparently a known problem and that's hard to fix.
>
> compacting garbage collector is our best friend!

Which R does not use because of the problems it would create for
external C/Fortran code on which R heavily relies.


-- 
Luke Tierney
Chair, Statistics and Actuarial Science
Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
University of Iowa                  Phone:             319-335-3386
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    Actuarial Science
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