Dear all,
I am having a memory problem when analyzing a rather large data set with
nested factors in R.
The model is of the form X~A*B*(C/D/F) A,B,C,D,F being the independent
variables some of which are nested.
The problem occurs when using aov but also when using glm or lme.
In particular I get the following response,

Error: cannot allocate vector of size 1.6 Gb
R(311,0xa000d000) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=1733365760) failed (error
code=3)
R(311,0xa000d000) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
R(311,0xa000d000) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug
R(311,0xa000d000) malloc: *** vm_allocate(size=1733365760) failed (error
code=3)
R(311,0xa000d000) malloc: *** error: can't allocate region
R(311,0xa000d000) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to debug

This is on an Intel Mac with 2 GBytes of RAM running MacOS X vs. 10.4.11
The very same result appears on an 8 core Intel Mac with 6 Gbytes of RAM and
on a Linux Box with 2 GBytes of RAM.
Is there a way to bypass this and let R allocate the necessary memory? Is
this a system problem? Would it be resolved in a mainframe for example?

thank you very much for your time,
georgios

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