Hi, I am using an Lenovo Thinkpad with Ubuntu and 5.5Gb of RAM.

I am running against a memory ceiling.
Upon starting R the following command executes, but
the system monitor tells me that R is now using 2.4 GB, and
gc() agrees with that:


> m=matrix(data=1,ncol=18e3,nrow=18e3)
> gc()
            used   (Mb) gc trigger   (Mb)  max used   (Mb)
Ncells    229272    6.2     467875   12.5    371942   10.0
Vcells 324988480 2479.5  358637093 2736.2 325139206 2480.7

However, when remove the matrix and increase the size of the
matrix I get an error

> rm(m)
> m=matrix(data=1,nrow=19e3,ncol=19e3)
Error: cannot allocate vector of size 2.7 Gb

This puzzles me, because there is no other user competing
with me for resources, and R is the only program running. And I
should have about twice as much memory available.

Is there a way in Ubuntu/Linux/Unix to allocate memory to R
when it is run from the command line?

Sincerely
Halldór

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