In help(gc) I read, "...the primary purpose of calling 'gc' is for the
report on memory usage".
What memory usage does gc() report?  And more importantly, which memory
uses does it NOT report?  Because I see one answer from gc():

           used  (Mb) gc trigger   (Mb) max used  (Mb)
Ncells 14875922 794.5   21754962 1161.9 17854776 953.6
Vcells 59905567 457.1   84428913  644.2 72715009 554.8

(That's about 1.5g max used, 1.8g trigger.)
And a different answer from an OS utility, 'top':

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND

 6210 brech     20   0 18.2g 7.2g 2612 S    1 93.4  16:26.73 R

So the R process is holding on to 18.2g memory, but it only seems to have
accout of 1.5g or so.
Where is the rest?

I tried searching the archives, and found answers like "just buy more RAM".
 Which doesn't exactly answer my question.  And come on, 18g is pretty big;
sure it doesn't fit in my RAM (only 7.2g are in), but that's beside the
point.

The huge memory demand is specific to R version 2.15.3 Patched (2013-03-13
r62500) -- "Security Blanket".  The same test runs without issues under R
version 2.15.1 beta (2012-06-11 r59557) -- "Roasted Marshmallows".

I appreciate any insights you can share into R's memory management, and
gc() in particular.
/Christian

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