Alan,

More RAM will definitely help.  But if you have an object needing more than
2^31-1 ~ 2 billion elements, you'll hit a wall regardless.  This could be
particularly limiting for matrices.  It is less limiting for data.frame
objects (where each column could be 2 billion elements).  But many R
analytics under the hood use matrices, so you may not know up front where
you could hit a limit.

Jay

---- Original message ----
I have a Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise machine, with 64bit R installed
running on 2 x Quad-core Intel Xeon 5500 processor with 24GB DDR3 1066 Mhz
RAM.  I am seeking to analyse very large data sets (perhaps as much as
10GB), without the addtional coding overhead of a package such as
bigmemory().

My question is this - if we were to increase the RAM on the machine to
(say) 128GB, would this become a possibility?  I have read the
documentation on memory limits and it seems so, but would like some
additional confirmation before investing in any extra RAM.
---------------------------------------------


-- 
John W. Emerson (Jay)
Associate Professor of Statistics, Adjunct, and Acting Director of Graduate
Studies
Department of Statistics
Yale University
http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jay

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