R help - Nov 2003 - Looking for recommendations for optimal memory settings

We have a Windows 2000 operating system and I need to configure the
workstations.  What are your recommendations for users with very large data
sets (300Mb)?  The systems are Dell GX240s with 512 Mbs of Ram.  What
command line or environment variables work best?


Sincerely,

Joe Busch
Urban Institute

On Mon, 17 Nov 2003, Busch, Joe wrote:
> We have a Windows 2000 operating system and I need to configure the
> workstations.  What are your recommendations for users with very large data
> sets (300Mb)?  The systems are Dell GX240s with 512 Mbs of Ram.  What
> command line or environment variables work best?
The default ones.  Just add another 1.5Gb of RAM and then consider
using --max-mem-size, the only setting that will make any real difference.
(The next minor version of R, probably 1.9.0, will make better use of 2Gb 
under Windows than the current one, so you may want to compile up 
pre-releases of that.)

-- 
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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:
> On Mon, 17 Nov 2003, Busch, Joe wrote:
> 
> > We have a Windows 2000 operating system and I need to configure the
> > workstations.  What are your recommendations for users with very large
data
> > sets (300Mb)?  The systems are Dell GX240s with 512 Mbs of Ram.  What
> > command line or environment variables work best?
> 
> The default ones.  Just add another 1.5Gb of RAM and then consider
> using --max-mem-size, the only setting that will make any real difference.
> (The next minor version of R, probably 1.9.0, will make better use of 2Gb 
> under Windows than the current one, so you may want to compile up 
> pre-releases of that.)
>From what I can see in looking at a couple of reviews, the GX240 uses
PC133 DIMMs and comes standard with 256 MB.  Depending on the number
of DIMM slots on the motherboard and the capacity of each slot it may
only be able to handle 1GB of memory and even that may mean removing
the 256 MB DIMMs to replace them with 512 MB DIMMs.  The good news is
that doing so is reasonably cheap.  According to www.pricewatch.com PC133
512 MB DIMMs are available for as little as (US)$40 whereas PC133 1 GB
DIMMs are (US)$160 and up.