R devel - Feb 2004 - R would not quit (bug?) (PR#6600)

Hello.

I am not sure if this is a bug.

I loaded into R a very large matrix, around 600,000 X 30 integers.  My 
machine has 2G ram.

After trying to write.table a modification of this matrix, R generated 
some sort of malloc error.

Then,

Error: vector memory exhausted (limit reached?)
 > q()
Save workspace image? [y/n/c]: n
*** malloc: vm_allocate(size=8421376) failed (error code=3)
*** malloc[14681]: error: Can't allocate region
Error: vector memory exhausted (limit reached?)
 >

Eventually I just killed the R session directly.

Michael

What happened to the results of R.version?  In particular what OS is this?

It looks like your process ran out of VM space, in which case there is 
little it can do but abort (if it can).  It is usually cleaner to kill the 
process from the shell.

I am not sure this is a bug in R, but it is not something we can fix at
all easily without a reproducible example.  And it does not look like
something worth spending a lot of time on.

If this is a standard Unix shutdown (as in Rstd_CleanUp), one possibility 
is that you had a .Last action trying to save: I can see no reason for 
anything else there to be allocating large amounts of memory.  See ?q
for details and how to circumvent this.


On Wed, 18 Feb 2004 Michael.C.Herron@dartmouth.edu wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I am not sure if this is a bug.
So what does the FAQ ask you to do in that circumstance?
> I loaded into R a very large matrix, around 600,000 X 30 integers.  My 
> machine has 2G ram.
> 
> After trying to write.table a modification of this matrix, R generated 
> some sort of malloc error.
> 
> Then,
> 
> Error: vector memory exhausted (limit reached?)
>  > q()
> Save workspace image? [y/n/c]: n
> *** malloc: vm_allocate(size=8421376) failed (error code=3)
> *** malloc[14681]: error: Can't allocate region
> Error: vector memory exhausted (limit reached?)
>  >
> 
> Eventually I just killed the R session directly.
> 
> Michael
-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595