Message-ID: <Pine.A41.4.58.0402050728530.95412@homer41.u.washington.edu>
Date: 2004-02-05T15:35:37Z
From: Thomas Lumley
Subject: error (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0402041536250.678-100000@localhost>
On Wed, 4 Feb 2004, Cere M. Davis wrote:
>
> Hi folks,
>
> I've got this funny problem with R's foreign library when reading stata
> files. One file consistently produces vector out of memory errors after
> gobbling up 2.7G of memory. I parsed through the read.dta function and
> figured out where the error occurs and the description is below. I am
> running R-1.8.1 on Debian stable system glibc2.2 kernel 2.4.24. R is is
> compiled from source as a shared library. The file that I am reading is
> only 172M in size. The system I am using has 4G of free memory and 8 G of
> swap so this doesn't seem to be a problem for lack of free memory. See
> Below.
I though this bug had already been fixed (Stefano Iacus reported it to me
a while back). The problem occurs when a variable has a set of factor
names assigned, but that set of names is not present in the file -- it was
not clear from the otherwise excellent Stata documentation that this is
possible in a valid .dta file.
Obviously the fix is not completely effective. I'll look into it.
-thomas
Thomas Lumley Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu University of Washington, Seattle