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).

I thought default limitation were set, but it does not seem to be the
case

mem.limits()

nsize vsize
   NA    NA

Any idea ?

Where am I wrong ?



Laurent


PS: I am currently using R-1.3.0-patched, compiled on SGI IRIX 6.5 (I
was using 1.2.3 and had the same kind of problems, that's why
I upgraded)

--
Laurent Gautier                 CBS, Building 208, DTU
PhD. Student                    D-2800 Lyngby,Denmark
tel: +45 45 25 24 85            http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/laurent

On Mon, 16 Jul 2001, Laurent Gautier wrote:

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).

Is this compiled as 32-bit or 64-bit process?

 And are there any
per-process limits set?  A 32-bit process will (by definition) have a
4Gb limit, and may well have 2Gb or less depending how the malloc is
organised.