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memory managment under Windows XP

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006, roger bos wrote:

            
It does help to rm() and then gc() at a point when you know that the 
number of objects in use is minimal.  R will gc() repeatedly when it 
starts to run out of address space, but this does not help if the address 
space is already fragmented.

The main problem on 32-bit OSes is (virtual) memory fragmentation, and 3Gb 
is not really much address space for objects in 100s of Mb.

I've now only got a 64-bit desktop and servers (plus a 32-bit Windows 
laptop).  It is a shame for Windows users that a 64-bit Open Source 
toolchain* is nowhere in sight, but I suspect a sufficiently determined 
user of Win64 could build a 64-bit port of R with commercial compilers.

*You need a compiler, assembler, linker and runtime, and the latter may 
well be the most problematic.