R devel - Oct 2003 - exceeding memory causes crash on Linux

I am having an unusual difficulty with R 1.8.0 on Mandrake 9.1 running a 
problem that takes a large amount of memory. With R 1.7.1  this ran on 
the machine I am using (barely), but now takes more memory than is 
available.  The first two times I tried with R 1.8.0, R exited after the 
program had run for some time, and gave no indication of anything, just 
returned to the shell command prompt. I ran under gdb to see if I could 
get a bettter indication of the problem, and this crashed Linux 
completely, or at least X, but I couldn't get another console either. (I 
haven't had anything crash Linux in a long time.) To confirm this I ran 
R under gdb again, and ran top to verify I was hitting memory 
constraints (which I was), but this time R did give a message "Error: 
cannot allocate a vector of size ..."

I'm not worried about running the problem, but I would like a more 
graceful exit. Might this be related to the change in error handling?

Paul Gilbert

Paul Gilbert wrote:
> I am having an unusual difficulty with R 1.8.0 on Mandrake 9.1 running 
> a problem that takes a large amount of memory. With R 1.7.1  this ran 
> on the machine I am using (barely), but now takes more memory than is 
> available.  The first two times I tried with R 1.8.0, R exited after 
> the program had run for some time, and gave no indication of anything, 
> just returned to the shell command prompt. I ran under gdb to see if I 
> could get a bettter indication of the problem, and this crashed Linux 
> completely, or at least X, but I couldn't get another console either. 
> (I haven't had anything crash Linux in a long time.) To confirm this I 
> ran R under gdb again, and ran top to verify I was hitting memory 
> constraints (which I was), but this time R did give a message "Error: 
> cannot allocate a vector of size ..." 
P.S. But there does not seem to be proper garbage collection after this. 
Top showed the memory still in use and subsequent attempts to run the 
program failed immediately trying to allocate a much smaller vector. 
When I did gc()  explicitely it did clean up and I could start the 
function again. The second time R exited back to the gdb prompt with a 
message "Program terminated with signal  SIGKILL, Killed. The program no 
longer exists."
> I'm not worried about running the problem, but I would like a more 
> graceful exit. Might this be related to the change in error handling?
>
> Paul Gilbert
>
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