R devel - Jan 2001 - memory trouble

I don't know whether this belongs to r-devel or rather r-help.

Under RW1.11 --nsize=8M --vsize=512M I could

n <- 500000
m <- 20
x <- matrix(rnorm(n*m), ncol=m, nrow=n)
gc()
> n <- 500000
> m <- 20
> x <- matrix(rnorm(n*m), ncol=m, nrow=n)
> gc()
           free    total (Mb)
Ncells  8190509  8388608  160
Vcells 57033698 67108864  512


# under RW1.20 --vanilla the same fails, some testing shows

n <- 500000
m <- 20

x <- matrix(ncol=m, nrow=n)
x <- matrix(NA, ncol=m, nrow=n)
x <- matrix(0, ncol=m, nrow=n)
x <- matrix(rep(NA, n*m), ncol=m, nrow=n)
x <- matrix(rep('0', n*m), ncol=m, nrow=n)
x <- matrix(rep(0, n*m), ncol=m, nrow=n)
x <- matrix(rep('0', n*m), ncol=m, nrow=n)
gc()
x <- matrix(rep('0', n*m), ncol=m, nrow=n)
x <- matrix(rnorm(n*m), ncol=m, nrow=n)
> n <- 500000
> m <- 20
> 
> x <- matrix(ncol=m, nrow=n)
> x <- matrix(NA, ncol=m, nrow=n)
> x <- matrix(0, ncol=m, nrow=n)
> x <- matrix(rep(NA, n*m), ncol=m, nrow=n)
> x <- matrix(rep('0', n*m), ncol=m, nrow=n)
Error: cannot allocate vector of size 39062 Kb
> x <- matrix(rep(0, n*m), ncol=m, nrow=n)
Error: cannot allocate vector of size 78125 Kb
> x <- matrix(rep('0', n*m), ncol=m, nrow=n)
Error: cannot allocate vector of size 39062 Kb
> gc()
           used (Mb) gc trigger  (Mb)
Ncells   174208  4.7     350000   9.4
Vcells 11109574 84.8   24307903 185.5
> x <- matrix(rep('0', n*m), ncol=m, nrow=n)
> x <- matrix(rnorm(n*m), ncol=m, nrow=n)
Error: cannot allocate vector of size 78125 Kb


Experimenting with --min-nsize=8M --min-vsize=512M --max-nsize=8M
--max-vsize=512M did not help.

What am I doing wrong?


Regards


Jens Oehlschlägel
(Research Consultant)


PIII NT4.0 Service Pack 6, 1 GB RAM, Physical Memory available due to task
manager: 934600 K
> version
         _              
platform i386-pc-mingw32
arch     x86            
os       Win32          
system   x86, Win32     
status                  
major    1              
minor    2.0            
year     2000           
month    12             
day      15             
language R  
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Read the documentation: CHANGES or ?Memory.

  New command-line option --max-mem-size to set the maximum memory
  allocation: it has a minimum allowed value of 10M.  This is intended
  to catch attempts to allocate excessive amounts of memory which may
  cause other processes to run out of resources.  The default is the
  smaller of the amount of physical RAM in the machine and 256Mb.

You probably want to read the rest of the descriptions, and reading
documentation is always a good idea, so please do read the rest of the
CHANGES file.

There is a good reason for the numbers: the new malloc likes a contiguous
memory space, and R only reserves 256Mb initially (out of the 2Gb space on
non-server versions).  You can re-compile it to reserve more.

-- 
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 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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