I will try with .wav files and report back. So far, I am not sure I understood what could be done (if anything) to fix it...
On Tue, Oct 21, 2014 at 2:26 AM, Prof Brian Ripley <rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote: > On 20/10/2014 17:53, John McKown wrote: >> >> On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 10:30 AM, Dimitri Liakhovitski < >> dimitri.liakhovit...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> Dear Rers, >>> >>> I am trying to run a for-loop in R. >>> During each iteration I read in an mp3 file and do some basic processing. >>> If I do what I need to do for each file one by one - it works fine. >>> But once I start running a loop, it soon runs out of memory and says: >>> can't >>> allocate a vector of size... >>> In each iteration of my loop I always overwrite the previously created >>> object and do gc(). >>> >>> Any hints on how to fight this? >>> >>> Thanks a lot! >>> >>> >>> >> Please don't use HTML for messages. >> >> What occurs to me, from reading the other replies, is that perhaps within >> the loop you are causing other objects to be allocated. And that can be >> done just by doing a simple assignment, so it may not be obvious. What >> this >> can do is cause what we called a "sand bar" in the old days. That's where >> you allocate a big chunk of memory for an object. Say this take up 1/2 of >> your available space. You now create a small object. This object is >> _probably_ right next to the large object. You now release the large >> object. Your apparent free space is now almost what it was at the >> beginning. But when you try to allocate another large object which is, >> say, >> 2/3 of the maximum space, you can't because that small object is sitting >> right in the middle of our memory space. So you _can_ allocate 2 large >> objects which are 1/3 your free space size, but not 1 object which is 2/3 >> of the free space size. Which can lead to your type of situation. >> >> This is just a SWAG based on some experience in other systems. Most >> "garbage collection" do _not_ do memory consolidation. I don't know about >> R. >> >> > That is true of R (except for the early days which did have a moving garbage > collector). > > However 'your available space' is not the amount of RAM you have but the > process address space. The latter is enormous on any 64-bit OS, so 'memory > fragmentation' (as this is termed) is a thing of the past except for those > limited to many-years-old OSes. > > > -- > Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk > Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford > 1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. -- Dimitri Liakhovitski ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
