Brian (and group):
Whoops. I wrote the message meaning to look at the version number
and fill it, but then somehow forgot. I am running version 0.63.2 (and
with the compile-time settings below was not getting and error message) --
so an upgrade is in order. The other advice (regarding compile-time
settings) is also very useful. Much appreciated.
I agree that R is not "designed" for large calculations. On the
other hand it is nice to have one statistical package to use for all
calculations. I mostly deal with Drosophila and DNA, as such I am an
amateur statistician and would like to avoid learning a number of
statistical languages. With a big Linux box, I can often power through
things. In the past I have found it frustrating to do a bunch of stuff in
SAS only to hit a snag and then have to write (time consuming) "C"
code to
finish the job. So although not designed for large calculations, R is so
flexible and logical that it is very attractive to use it for such...I
think that many other people may be similarly attracted to the language. I
would appreciate dialog, as I think that much more may have been
accomplished in R than was intended by the founders.
>On Fri, 14 May 1999, Tony Long wrote:
>
>> I am running R version ??? under Redhat 5.2. It seems as though the
>> --nsize object has no effct on the size of the allocated Ncells as
>> determined using gc(). Yes, I have that much data....
>>
>> That is if I envoke R with
>>
>> R --vsize 100 --nsize 5000000
>>
>> then type
>>
>> gc()
>>
>> I get
>>
>> free total
>> Ncells 92202 200000
>> Vcells 12928414 13107200
>
>Well, we do need to know what ??? is (is it so hard?: it appears on the
>start-up banner, or use Version()). There are limits to both nsize and
>vsize, but they are currently 20000000 and 2048M. If you try to specify
>more than the limit, you will get a warning about the limit being ignored.
>(Have you overlooked that as well as the start-up banner?) Given that a
>recent version of R will object to --vsize 100 (it should be 100M), I
>surmise yours is not 0.64.1 and suggest you upgrade.
>
>The limits are OS-specific compile-time settings: look in src/unix/system.c
>to change them for Linux. The real limit on vsize is LONG_MAX, slightly
>greater on a 32-bit machine, and I guess the limit on nsize is chosen to be
>comparable (it is harder to need lots of ncells). However, as Ross has
>said here, R is not designed for very large computations so the current
>limits may be rather academic.
>
>--
>Brian D. Ripley, ripley at 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
Tony Long
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Steinhaus Hall
University of California at Irvine
Irvine, CA
92697-2525
Tel: (949) 824-2562 (office) ****NOTE NEW AREA CODE****
Tel: (949) 824-5994 (lab) ****NOTE NEW AREA CODE****
Fax: (949) 824-2181 ****NOTE NEW AREA CODE****
email: tdlong at uci.edu
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