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POR memory management / cannot allocate vector of size n Mb
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  1. POR memory management / cannot allocate vector of size n Mb
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    copied!<p>I am running into issues trying to use large objects in R. For example:</p> <pre><code>&gt; memory.limit(4000) &gt; a = matrix(NA, 1500000, 60) &gt; a = matrix(NA, 2500000, 60) &gt; a = matrix(NA, 3500000, 60) Error: cannot allocate vector of size 801.1 Mb &gt; a = matrix(NA, 2500000, 60) Error: cannot allocate vector of size 572.2 Mb # Can't go smaller anymore &gt; rm(list=ls(all=TRUE)) &gt; a = matrix(NA, 3500000, 60) # Now it works &gt; b = matrix(NA, 3500000, 60) Error: cannot allocate vector of size 801.1 Mb # But that is all there is room for </code></pre> <p>I understand that this is related to the difficulty of obtaining contiguous blocks of memory (from <a href="http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/base/html/Memory-limits.html" rel="noreferrer">here</a>):</p> <blockquote> <p>Error messages beginning cannot allocate vector of size indicate a failure to obtain memory, either because the size exceeded the address-space limit for a process or, more likely, because the system was unable to provide the memory. Note that on a 32-bit build there may well be enough free memory available, but not a large enough contiguous block of address space into which to map it.</p> </blockquote> <p>How can I get around this? My main difficulty is that I get to a certain point in my script and R can't allocate 200-300 Mb for an object... I can't really pre-allocate the block because I need the memory for other processing. This happens even when I dilligently remove unneeded objects.</p> <p>EDIT: Yes, sorry: Windows XP SP3, 4Gb RAM, R 2.12.0:</p> <pre><code>&gt; sessionInfo() R version 2.12.0 (2010-10-15) Platform: i386-pc-mingw32/i386 (32-bit) locale: [1] LC_COLLATE=English_Caribbean.1252 LC_CTYPE=English_Caribbean.1252 [3] LC_MONETARY=English_Caribbean.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C [5] LC_TIME=English_Caribbean.1252 attached base packages: [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base </code></pre>
 

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