[R] Problem with sample(...,size = 1000000000,...)

[jim holtman]

Do you realize you are trying to create a vector with 1 billion
entries, so this will take some time.  How much memory do you have on
your computer?

Here are some times to generate increasing sample sizes.  I have 16GB
on my computer and it took only 30 seconds to generate the data and
used almost 12GB of memory.

> system.time(x<-sample(1:5,100000,TRUE,c(0.1,0.2,0.4,0.2,0.1)))
   user  system elapsed
      0       0       0
> system.time(x<-sample(1:5,1000000,TRUE,c(0.1,0.2,0.4,0.2,0.1)))
   user  system elapsed
   0.03    0.00    0.03
> system.time(x<-sample(1:5,10000000,TRUE,c(0.1,0.2,0.4,0.2,0.1)))
   user  system elapsed
   0.47    0.02    0.49
> system.time(x<-sample(1:5,100000000,TRUE,c(0.1,0.2,0.4,0.2,0.1)))
   user  system elapsed
   3.09    0.24    3.33
> system.time(x<-sample(1:5,1000000000,TRUE,c(0.1,0.2,0.4,0.2,0.1)))
   user  system elapsed
  30.76    1.70   32.92
> memory.size()
[1] 11502.52

Jim Holtman
Data Munger Guru

What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
Tell me what you want to do, not how you want to do it.


On Sat, Oct 15, 2016 at 12:19 PM, Huy Nguyễn <quanghuy1258 at gmail.com> wrote:
> When I ran this code:
> "
> x<-sample(1:5,1000000000,TRUE,c(0.1,0.2,0.4,0.2,0.1))
> print(table(x)/1000000000)
> plot(table(x)/1000000000,type="h",xlab="x",ylab="P(x)")
> "
> My laptop was frozen and didn't respond. Although I used ctrl+alt+del to
> terminate r program, my laptop still did nothing. And I must restart my
> laptop immediately or my laptop might be broken down.
> Thus, I think in the future the program should have something to control
> the memory and time when it is running and can be terminated if necessary.
>
>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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