[R-sig-Geo] memory issue on R with Linux 64

[Alexander.Herr at csiro.au]

Hi Edzer,

I didn't expect R to do magic (although it does it better than most prgs). What surprised me was that under Linux there was no use of swap space - I hoped memory handling would be including swap space. 

Cheers
Herry


-----Original Message-----
From: Edzer Pebesma [mailto:edzer.pebesma at uni-muenster.de] 
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2009 6:01 PM
To: Herr, Alexander Herr - Herry (CSE, Gungahlin)
Cc: r-sig-geo at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [R-sig-Geo] memory issue on R with Linux 64

Well, this doesn't come as a surprise; if it did for you then you didn't read the list archives well.

R has been designed for analysing statistical data, which usually doesn't outnumber billions of observations, and not for analysis/processing of large grids/imagery.

rgdal has infrastructure to let you go through huge grids by reading and writing only parts at a time; you can find pointers to this in the rgdal documentation, examples on the list. I don't know of functions that do this automatically for you; maybe the raster package on r-forge?

Another option is to buy more ram. I am using debian on a 32 Gb ram workstation; I was surprised (really) how little it costed. It saves me time.
--
Edzer

Alexander.Herr at csiro.au wrote:
> Hi List,
>
> I get an error using readGDAL{rgdal}: cannot allocate vector of size 
> 3.1 Gb
>
> I am using Linux 64bit (opensuse 11) with 4 gig swap and 4 gig Ram and R 2.8.0. 
>
> The load monitor shows that most of Ram is used up and then when Swap use starts increasing, R returns the error.
>
> Is there anything I should do within R to circumvent this?
>
>
> Any help appreciated
> Thanks
> Herry
> _______________________________________________
> R-sig-Geo mailing list
> R-sig-Geo at stat.math.ethz.ch
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo
>   

--
Edzer Pebesma
Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi), University of Münster Weseler Straße 253, 48151 Münster, Germany. Phone: +49 251 8333081, Fax: +49 251 8339763 http://ifgi.uni-muenster.de/
http://www.springer.com/978-0-387-78170-9 e.pebesma at wwu.de