On 9/16/2009 10:16 AM, michael watson (IAH-C) wrote:
Hi
I'm running 32-bit R on Windows XP 64bit and the machine has 16Gb of RAM. The 
help for memory.limit states:

If 32-bit R is run on some 64-bit versions of Windows the maximum value of 
obtainable memory is just under 4GB.

So, using the help which states the size parameter can go up to 4095:

memory.limit(size=4095)

When I run mclust I get:

Error: cannot allocate vector of size 1.3 Gb

So, now I set the max-mem-size flag:

--max-mem-size=3500M

Repeat and I still get the same error:

Error: cannot allocate vector of size 1.3 Gb

So, can anyone help?  32 bit R is reported to be able to use up to 4Gb of RAM 
on 64 bit windows, yet mine croaks at 1.3Gb.

You are misreading things in a couple of places. The most important one is the error message: it says allocation of a 1.3 Gb object failed. You may have 4 Gb available in total, but have used so much of it already that Windows won't allocate a 1.3 Gb piece to R. Using Rprofmem() might show how the allocations are happening.

Another possibility is that your particular version of Windows doesn't support giving 4 Gb to R. Run memory.size(NA) to find out the limit, memory.size() to find out the current amount in use.

And even if the limit is close to 4 Gb and you have more than 1.3 Gb free, the allocation may fail because there is no sufficiently large contiguous block available. Once memory is allocated, that address is in use and is unavailable. Since the 32 bit address space only covers 4 Gb, you can fairly easily end up with allocations that are spread out across it leaving no large blocks available. That's the advantage of switching to 64 bit R: even if you still only had 4 Gb of memory available, the address space is so much bigger that fragmentation probably won't be a problem.

Duncan Murdoch


sessionInfo()
R version 2.9.2 (2009-08-24)
i386-pc-mingw32
locale:
LC_COLLATE=English_United Kingdom.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_United 
Kingdom.1252;LC_MONETARY=English_United 
Kingdom.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_United Kingdom.1252
attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
other attached packages:
[1] mclust_3.3.1

Thanks
Mick

______________________________________________
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.

______________________________________________
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.

Reply via email to