R help - Oct 2012 - Options to extend memory limit

Dear All, 

at the moment I am using R for calculations of large databases. 
Unfortunately, R only manages to complete certain operations at some 
times, and not at others. I usually get the error message "cannot allocate 
vector of size XX" 

I am using the 64-bit version with Windows 7. While my computer has 8 RAM, 
I do have a feeling that R cannot use all of it. 

Searching online, I found that you can increase the memory with the 
options --max-mem-size/ --max-ppsize or change the environment variable 
R_MAX_MEM_SIZE to "allow deep recursion or large and complicated 
calculations to be done" 

Unfortunately, I am not very knowledgable yet on how to use R and I did 
not quite manage to use the commands successfully. Could you please tell 
me whether these do make sense for my case and if so how (and at what 
stage of the process) I can use them? 

Thank you very, very much in advance. 
Kind regards, 

Jennifer




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<jennifer.moeller-gulland <at> de.pwc.com> writes:
> at the moment I am using R for calculations of large databases. 
> Unfortunately, R only manages to complete certain operations at some 
> times, and not at others. I usually get the error message "cannot
allocate
> vector of size XX" 
> 
> I am using the 64-bit version with Windows 7. While my computer has 8 RAM, 
> I do have a feeling that R cannot use all of it. 
> 
> Searching online, I found that you can increase the memory with the 
> options --max-mem-size/ --max-ppsize or change the environment variable 
> R_MAX_MEM_SIZE to "allow deep recursion or large and complicated 
> calculations to be done" 
  I believe this may be somewhat out of date (although I don't use
Windows so I'm a little rusty). If you are dealing with large databases
you should almost certainly check out the High Performance Computing
task view (you can google it), which recommends many approaches for
dealing with Big Data.

On Thu, 11 Oct 2012 14:45:16 +0200,
<jennifer.moeller-gulland at de.pwc.com> wrote:
> Dear All, at the moment I am using R for calculations of large
> databases.  Unfortunately, R only manages to complete certain
> operations at some times, and not at others. I usually get the error
> message "cannot allocate vector of size XX"
> I am using the 64-bit version with Windows 7. While my computer has 8
> RAM, I do have a feeling that R cannot use all of it.
> Searching online, I found that you can increase the memory with the
> options --max-mem-size/ --max-ppsize or change the environment
> variable R_MAX_MEM_SIZE to "allow deep recursion or large and
> complicated calculations to be done"
> Unfortunately, I am not very knowledgable yet on how to use R and I
> did not quite manage to use the commands successfully. Could you
> please tell me whether these do make sense for my case and if so how
> (and at what stage of the process) I can use them?
Are you sure you're using the 64 bit R executable which comes with the R
installation?

-- 
Seb