[R] Options to extend memory limit

[Ben Bolker]

 <jennifer.moeller-gulland <at> de.pwc.com> writes:

> at the moment I am using R for calculations of large databases. 
> Unfortunately, R only manages to complete certain operations at some 
> times, and not at others. I usually get the error message "cannot allocate 
> vector of size XX" 
> 
> I am using the 64-bit version with Windows 7. While my computer has 8 RAM, 
> I do have a feeling that R cannot use all of it. 
> 
> Searching online, I found that you can increase the memory with the 
> options --max-mem-size/ --max-ppsize or change the environment variable 
> R_MAX_MEM_SIZE to "allow deep recursion or large and complicated 
> calculations to be done" 

  I believe this may be somewhat out of date (although I don't use
Windows so I'm a little rusty). If you are dealing with large databases
you should almost certainly check out the High Performance Computing
task view (you can google it), which recommends many approaches for
dealing with Big Data.