[R-sig-Geo] Memory limit problems in R / import of maps

[Tomislav Hengl]

Dear list,

I know that much has already been said about the memory limit problems. If there is any progress
about this problem, we would be interested to hear.

In our project, we are importing 24 maps/bands, each consists of 1,450,000 pixels. We further would
like to glue all maps into a single data frame (e.g. 'ksc' class in adehabitat package; or
'SpatialGridDataFrame' in sp package), but this seems to be impossible.

We tried to run this under windows (after following
http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/rw-FAQ.html#There-seems-to-be-a-limit-on-the-memory-it-us
es_0021 and setting the --max-mem-size) and under Linux Ubuntu, but still get the same error message
(seems that there is no difference in use of memory under the two OS):

"Error: Cannot allocate vector of size 11.1 Mb"

The R workspace with 24 loaded grids is also really small (18 MB), but any further gluing and
calculation is blocked due the vector size error message.

For a comparison, in a GIS such as ArcGIS or SAGA/ILWIS (open source) we have no problems of loading
and processing 3-4 times more grids. 

Should we simply give up on running spatial analysis using large grids (>10 million grids) in R?

Any suggestion or comment is more than welcome,



Tom Hengl
http://spatial-analyst.net