Memory filling up while looping

have you tried putting calls to 'gc' at the top of the first loop to
make sure memory is reclaimed? You can print the call to 'gc' to see
how fast it is growing.

On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 6:26 PM, Peter Meissner
<peter.meissner at uni-konstanz.de> wrote:

Hey,

I have an double loop like this:


chunk <- list(1:10, 11:20, 21:30)
for(k in 1:length(chunk)){
         print(chunk[k])
         DummyCatcher <- NULL
         for(i in chunk[k]){
                 print("i load something")
                 dummy <- 1
                 print("i do something")
                 dummy <- dummy + 1
                 print("i do put it together")
                 DummyCatcher = rbind(DummyCatcher, dummy)
         }
         print("i save a chunk and restart with another chunk of data")
}

The problem now is that with each 'chunk'-cycle the memory used by R becomes
bigger and bigger until it exceeds my RAM but the RAM it needs for any of
the chunk-cycles alone is only a 1/5th of what I have overall.

Does somebody have an idea why this behaviour might occur? Note that all the
objects (like 'DummyCatcher') are reused every cycle so that I would assume
that the RAM used should stay about the same after the first 'chunk' cycle.


Best, Peter


SystemInfo:

R version 2.15.2 (2012-10-26)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Win7 Enterprise, 8 GB RAM