Hi, Carl.

I wouldn't worry too much about this, but you might take a look at help(gc)
as a start.  When you delete an object, it may not be immediately garbage
collected.  As for things moving into and out of virtual memory, R has no
real control over that process; that is under the control of the OS
generally speaking.  Others on the list may be able to give you more detail
on both counts.

Sean


On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 7:28 PM, Carl Witthoft <carl@witthoft.com> wrote:

> I'm not sure exactly what's happening, so I'll try to describe the steps
> in detail.  I get the same behavior with R 2.12.1 and R 2.13, OSX 10.6.6
> or 10.6.4 .
>
> First, I boot up Activity Monitor and set it to show memory usage.
>
> I create a large object (in the R Console of R.app GUI) , such as
>
> foo<-runif(1e8)
>
> and the "real memory" in the table and "active memory" in the pie chart
> go up.  No surprise.
>
> Then I get rid of foo,
>
> rm(foo)
>
> But the memory allocations don't change.   Looks like a memory leak?
>
> Two other things I found:
>
> 1) If I write a function that does nothing but create some big objects
> like that, and then deletes them,  ActivityMonitor shows memory
> allocated to R and then freed up.  This is what I'd expect from the
> R.app GUI as well.
>
> 2) If I boot several other applications, using up all my RAM, at some
> point the operating system moves some of R's active memory into virtual
> memory.  Now the funny thing:  if I make R the foreground app, or if I
> simply quit all the other apps,  R does not get its active memory
> allocation back.  The 'pie chart' shows memory has been freed, not just
> "inactive" .
>
> Did I set some bad parameter in one of my config files?  Is there some
> way within R to force all that memory to be freed up (other than
> quitting and restarting R)?
>
> Thanks for your help -- I'm not the least put out if someone wants to
> point out what a dummy I'm being.
>
> Carl
>
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