Minumum memory requirements to run R.

Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

Quite a while back we set the goal of running R in 16Mb RAM, as people (I 
think Kjetil) had teaching labs that small.

It's a while since I actually har R used on such small machines, I think
64 MB is quite acceptable now.

May I add another note to this - I recently upgraded to 64-bits (AMD 
opteron) and noticed the memory foot print of R has shot up. Just 
starting R takes up 90+MB virtual. There are correponding increases with 
Python and Perl as well; I suspect R suffers a bit on 64-bit
platform due to extensive use of pointers internally. The fundamental
unit in R, SEXP, is 6 pointers + 1 int, (and another
pointer for itself). So I would probably say 64MB is questionable on 
64-bit, but then probably nobody is stupid enough to do that...

For those who want to investigate the equivalent in Perl, the equivalent 
perl headers corresponding to "R/include/Rinternals.h" is located at
the "-I" flags of the output of:

perl -MExtUtils::Embed -e ccopts

(no idea where python stores its stuff...)

Hin-Tak Leung

Kjetil

Since then R has grown, and we has recently started to optimize R for 
speed rather than size.  I recently tested R-devel on my ancient Win98 
notebook with 64Mb RAM -- it ran but startup was rather slow on what I 
think is a 233MHz processor and very slow disc.

R still runs in 16Mb, but that is getting tight.  Does anyone have any 
need to run on a smaller machine than my 64Mb notebook?

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