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R process killed when allocating too large matrix (Mac OS X)

2 messages · Marius Hofert, Simon Urbanek

#
Dear expeRts,

The following code leads to R being killed (under Mac OS X 10.11.4; R
installed from source; also happened under a previous unstable
version):

m <- matrix(0, 100000, 100000)

I expected an error that a vector of this size could not be allocated.

Besides the above (a bug?), how can I find out beforehand whether or
not a square matrix can be allocated?

Cheers,
Marius


PS: Here is the sessionInfo() output:

R version 3.3.0 (2016-05-03)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin15.4.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.11.4 (El Capitan)

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
#
On May 3, 2016, at 9:51 PM, Marius Hofert <marius.hofert at uwaterloo.ca> wrote:

            
Can you elaborate on "leads to R being killed"? You should tell to the killer not to do it again :).

Cheers,
Simon