Zerdna, Please note that the CRAN version 3.12 is about to be replaced by a new cluster of packages now on R-Forge; we consider the new bigmemory >= 4.0 to be "stable" and recommend you start using it immediately. Please see http://www.bigmemory.org.
In your case, two comments: (1) Your for() loop will generate three identical copies of filebackings on disk, yes. Note that when the loop exists, the R object xx will reference only the 3rd of these, so xx[1,1] <- 1 will modify only the third filebacking, not the first two. You'll need to use the separate descriptor files (probably created automatically for you, but we recommend naming them specifically using descriptorfile=) to attach.big.matrix() whatever of these you really want to be using. (2) In the problem with "hanging" I believe you have exhausted the shared resources on your system. This problem will no longer arise in the >= 4.0 problems, as we're handling mutexes separately rather than automatically. These shared resource limits are mysterious, depending on the OS as well as the hardware and other jobs or tasks in existence at any given point in time. But again, it shouldn't be a problem with the new version. The CRAN update should take place early next week, along with some revised documentation. Regards, Jay --------------- Message: 125 Date: Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:51:32 -0800 (PST) From: zerdna <az...@yahoo.com> To: r-help@r-project.org Subject: [R] bigmemory package woes Message-ID: <1272059492009-2062996.p...@n4.nabble.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii I have pretty big data sizes, like matrices of .5 to 1.5GB so once i need to juggle several of them i am in need of disk cache. I am trying to use bigmemory package but getting problems that are hard to understand. I am getting seg faults and machine just hanging. I work by the way on Red Hat Linux, 64 bit R version 10. Simplest problem is just saving matrices. When i do something like r<-matrix(rnorm(100), nr=10); librarybigmemory) for(i in 1:3) xx<-as.big.matrix(r, backingfile=paste("r",i, sep="", collapse=""), backingpath=MyDirName) it works just fine -- saves small matrices as three different matrices on disc. However, when i try it with real size, like with r<-matrix(normal(50000000), nr=1000) I am either getting seg fault on saving the third big matrix, or hang forever. Am i doing something obviously wrong, or is it an unstable package at the moment? Could anyone recommend something similar that is reliable in this case? -- John W. Emerson (Jay) Associate Professor of Statistics Department of Statistics Yale University http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jay [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ 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.