On Mon, 23 Jan 2006, Hin-Tak Leung wrote:
Kjetil Brinchmann Halvorsen wrote:
Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
Quite a while back we set the goal of running R in 16Mb RAM, as people (I
think Kjetil) had teaching labs that small.
It's a while since I actually har R used on such small machines, I think
64 MB is quite acceptable now.
May I add another note to this - I recently upgraded to 64-bits (AMD opteron)
and noticed the memory foot print of R has shot up. Just starting R takes up
90+MB virtual.
That's a different question. I said RAM, you quote virtual. I am
suprised at your figure though, as I am used to seeing 40-50Mb virtual at
startup on an Opteron.
The distinction is important: even those small Windows machines had 100s
of Mb of virtual memory available, it was RAM that was in short supply.
There are correponding increases with Python and Perl as well;
I suspect R suffers a bit on 64-bit
platform due to extensive use of pointers internally. The fundamental
unit in R, SEXP, is 6 pointers + 1 int, (and another
pointer for itself). So I would probably say 64MB is questionable on 64-bit,
but then probably nobody is stupid enough to do that...
We know: we even document it in the appropriate places.
Some of us were running 64-bit R last century on machines with 128Mb (and
others with much more, of course). When I tried in 1997, Solaris would
not run in 64-bit mode with 64Mb RAM (which then cost £1000 or so).
--
Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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