AW: [R] Out of memory

"Liaw, Andy" wrote:

I have run into similar problems occasionally on Windoze 

NT.  For whatever

reason, R refuses to do anything, including q("no").  

So you got a prompt and were able to type it in? Strange! Never seen
something like that! 

The only way out was
to kill it via Task Manager.  Not sure how to make it reproducible.
Unfortunately Uwe's comments are not exactly helpful, 

though mostly true.

a) What was wrong?

OK, the memory.limit(...) command was unreasonable as your comment pointed out. The version hint may also prove helpful. 

But you did not comment all the reasonable commands I typed in (Andy added on another one) without getting a reasonable response from R. Why not? Thus it seemed to me that you would expect and accept that kind of behaviour of R: E.g. loading some data into memory which exceed the recent memory size will result in refusing any further command (more precise: getting a prompt and an invariable response to any typed command). This is not exactly helpful...

b) They were helpful, since, obviously, the usage of 
memory.limit() was
not reasonable.

c) Some more un-helpful comments on memory usage:
One of my collegeaus asked me how to compute all possible permutations
of the integers 1, 2, ..., 20 and save them to a file. Well, 
I told him,
in principle he could use ... But he should think about the memory
usage, since these are 20! permutations * 20 integers to store. If he
could use just one byte per integer, approx. 50000000000 
GigaByte would
be required. ;-)

Maybe helpful for him. Even though not exactly the focus of my contribution.

Best,
Uwe

Nikolaus Hansen
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