search for: 6x700000

Hi, I am trying to read a tab-delimited file into R (Ver. 2.8). The machine I am using is 64bit Linux with 16 GB. The file is basically a matrix(~600x700000) and as large as 3GB. The read.delim() ran extremely slow (hours) even with a subset of the file (31 MB with 6x700000) I monitored the memory usage, and found it constantly only took less than 1% of 16GB memory. Does read.delim() have difficulty to read files with lots of columns? Any suggestions? Thanks, Mike [[alternative HTML version deleted]]