Possibly breaking changes in rgeos
In this sf issue (https://github.com/r-spatial/sf/issues/822), it was pointed out that error handling in rgeos (and sf) leaked memory at least when invalid geometries triggered an exception, leading to an R error, but without the GEOS objects being freed/destroyed. An attempt has been made to address this problem in rgeos, and is available for testing from R-Forge (version 0.4-1): install.packages("rgeos", repos="http://R-Forge.R-project.org") Please check whether this version (throwing the R error after freeing memory in calling function rather than throwing the R error immediately on exception) has missed any important points in your typical workflows - if you find any, please write directly to me as maintainer with a small reproducible example for adding to tests/leak_by_exception.R. If you find anything, also consider using gdb and/or valgrind to backtrack to the rgeos C function causing the mayhem. Grateful for any reports, Roger (rgeos maintainer)
Roger Bivand Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2392-6140 https://scholar.google.no/citations?user=AWeghB0AAAAJ&hl=en