>>>>> Ben Bolker <bbol...@gmail.com> >>>>> on Sat, 28 May 2016 15:42:45 +0000 writes:
> Anthony Damico <ajdamico <at> gmail.com> writes: >> >> hi, here's a minimal reproducible example that crashes my >> R 3.3.0 console on a powerful windows server. below the >> example, i've put the error (not crash) that occurs on R >> 3.2.3. >> >> should this be reported to http://bugs.r-project.org/ or >> am i doing something silly? thanx > From the R FAQ (9.1): > If R executes an illegal instruction, or dies with an > operating system error message that indicates a problem in > the program (as opposed to something like “disk full”), > then it is certainly a bug. > So you could submit a bug report, *or* open a discussion > on r-de...@r-project.org (which I'd have said was a more > appropriate venue for this question in any case) ... Indeed. In this case, this is a known problem -- not just of R, but of many programs that you can run --- You are requesting (much) more memory than your computer has RAM, and in this situation -- depending on the OS --- your computer will kill R (what you saw) or your it will become very slow trying to shove all memory to R and start swapping (out to disk other running / sleeping processes on the computer). Both is very unpleasant... But it is you as R user who asked R to allocate an object of about 41.6 Gigabytes (26 * 1.6, see below). As Ben mentioned this may be worth a discussion on R-devel ... or you rather follow up the existing thread opened by Marius Hofert three weeks ago, with subject "[Rd] R process killed when allocating too large matrix (Mac OS X)" --> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2016-May/072648.html His simple command to "crash R" was matrix(0, 1e5, 1e5) which for some of use gives an error such as > x <- matrix(0, 1e5,1e5) Error: cannot allocate vector of size 74.5 Gb but for others it had the same effect as your example. BTW: I repeat it here in a functionalized form with added comments which makes apparent what's going on: ## Make simple data.frame mkDf <- function(grpsize, wrongSize = FALSE) { ne <- (if(wrongSize) 26 else 1) *grpsize data.frame(x = rep(LETTERS, each = ne), v = runif(grpsize*26), stringsAsFactors=FALSE) } g1 <- ceiling(10^5/26) d1 <- mkDf(g1) # works fine str(d1) ## 'data.frame': 100022 obs. of 2 variables: dP <- mkDf(g1, wrong=TRUE)# mis-matching the number of elements str(dP) # is 26 times larger ## 'data.frame': 2600572 obs. of 2 variables: ..... # make this much bigger gLarge <- ceiling(10^8/26) dL <- mkDf(gLarge) # works "fine" .. (well, takes time!!) str(dL) ## 'data.frame': 100000004 obs. of 2 variables: as.numeric(print(object.size(dL)) / 1e6) ## 1600002088 bytes ## [1] 1600.002 Mega i.e., 1.6 GBytes ## Well, this will be 26 times larger than already large ==> your R may crash *OR* ## your computer may basically slow down to a crawl, when R requests all its memory... if(FALSE) ## ==> do *NOT* evaluate the following lightly !! dLL <- mkDf(gLarge, wrong=TRUE) # CONSOLE CRASH WITHOUT EXPLANATION # C:\Users\AnthonyD> ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.