[R-SIG-Mac] G5 memory problems

[Simon Urbanek]

Hi Jonathan,

On May 10, 2005, at 10:34 AM, Jonathan Elsas wrote:

> I'm trying to use the fastICA package on a G5 tower (dual 2GHz,  
> 4Gig ram) and am continually running into memory allocation errors:
>
> *** malloc: vm_allocate(size=844603392) failed (error code=3)
> *** malloc[1272]: error: Can't allocate region
> Error in fastICA(m, 10, method = "C", verbose = TRUE) :
>         Calloc could not allocate (211149961 of 4) memory
> [...]
> any advice on increasing the amount of memory R can allocate?  or  
> is this a hard limit?

The CRAN binary is 32-bit, so in theory R can allocate up to a bit  
below 4GB (AFAIR my test showed something around 3.5GB). Above R is  
asking for almost 1GB which is a lot given that it must be contiguous  
space in RAM so I bet you're simply running out of (non-fragmented)  
memory (that 1GB is just one object - who knows how many copies  
fastICA actually creates ...). You could run some profiling to see  
how much memory is really used - it could be even more than your 4GB ..

Although the error doesn't occur in Rserve, you should be aware that  
Rserve creates a serialized copy of transported objects, so you don't  
really want to transport all the 1GB back through TCP/IP ;).

Cheers,
Simon