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how many records can R handle

Exactly what do you want to do with the data?  It is 5M rows with 100
columns of data?  Do you want to read it all in at once?  If so, and
if they are numeric, you will need 4GB to hold one copy, and be
running on a 64-bit version of R.  If you want to do any processing
with everything in memory, I would suggest you have at least 16GB of
real memory since copies may be made while processing. Can you put
this on a data base and only read in the columns you need.  I can
handle 5M rows with 10 columns on my laptop with 2GB easily.  So it
all depends on the problem you are trying to solve.
On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 12:34 PM, Richard White <rhwhite at ucdavis.edu> wrote: