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...
Would you prefer the process to be terminated?
No. Even tough in effect there were no difference.
You used up all the resources allocated to R. None could be freed by garbage collection. What was R supposed to do? There was no memory left to do anything else in.
Easy to say what I would expect from the users point of view: An error message if I try to use too much memory and afterwards the possibility to free memory, e.g. by rm(some.of.my.data) and/or do a garbage collection. I have no idea if this would be difficult to ensure under any circumstances.
I think this circumstance is very rare (normally you get enough memory back to do something). I would prefer it to allowing R to take over all the VM on a computer, when you probably need to reboot. Those who have not seen this happen on a departmental server (say) should consider themselves fortunate.
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