Trouble with the memory allocation

Dear R-users,


I am currently facing what appears to be a strange thing (at least to my
humble understanding).

If  I understood correctly, starting with the version 1.2.3, R memory
allocation can be done dynamically,
and there is no need to fiddle with the --nsize and --vsize parameter
any longer...

So far this everything seemed to go this way (I saw the size of my
processes growing when I was using big objects and
so on). Howver recently I had trouble with the memory. It seems there is
a limit of about 1,2 Go, beyond which R starts
to send memory allocation error messages...  not consistent with the
memory still available
(like 'Error: cannot allocate vector of size 125382 Kb', while there
still about 17Go free).

There is an upper limit on the memory size because some internal objects in the memory manager are stored as ints (even on a 64-bit system this  limits you, I think, to 4Gb, but it may be 2Gb).  

It shouldn't be too hard to expand these limits for 64-bit systems. There is a much firmer limit in the design of R to no more than 2^31 objects, and to objects of maximum length 2^31, but this would still allow multigigabyte workspaces.


    -thomas



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