Memory/data -last time I promise

On Tue, 24 Jul 2001, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

The main problem I see is that your machine seems unable to allocate more
than about 450Mb to R, and it has surprisingly little swap space.  (This
512Mb Linux machine has 1Gb of swap allocated, and happily allocates 800Mb
to R when needed.)

Well, this rises an interesting point for me: are there advices on
how to configure a particular system for best R performance with
large datasets? I've looked into the R system guide and could not find
anything (that document is a bit obscure for me, must recognize).
Do you get the 800 Mb by starting R with a particular option?

No, just the standard options.  Basically, under Unix/Linux

1) Make sure the ulimit/limit settings are suitable (look up your shell
documentation).

2) Make sure you do have ample swap space configured: disc space is
really cheap, and with the current non-moving-objects garbage collector,
currently unused large objects can be successfully swapped out.  (That was
not true before 1.2.0.)

3) Start R without any options.

So there is no advice, as nothing special is needed.

On *Windows*  there is an equivalent of ulimit/limit set and you are likely
to be less successful in running large R workspaces.  In some far as I
understand it, this applies to the classic Mac port too.

Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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