dealing with large objects -- memory wasting ?

[Martin Maechler]

Consider the following:

    > gcinfo(TRUE)
    [1] FALSE
    > rm(list=ls()); gc()
	     free  total
    Ncells 135837 250000
    Vcells 747306 786432
	   ------
    > n <- 10000; p <- 20; X <- matrix(rnorm(n*p), n,p); gc()
    Garbage collection [nr. 23]...
    135839 cons cells free (54%)
    4275 Kbytes of heap free (69%)
	     free  total
    Ncells 135829 250000
    Vcells 547299 786432
	   ------
	   which is roughly 200000 less than before;
	   i.e. Vcells are 8-byte sized,
	   1 Vcell = 1 double or 2 integers

  Since we have 747 thousands of them , 
  constructing X the double size (400'000) shouldn't be a problem ...

    > rm(X); n <- 20000; p <- 20; X <- matrix(rnorm(n*p), n,p); gc()
    Garbage collection [nr. 25]...
    135823 cons cells free (54%)
    2713 Kbytes of heap free (44%)

    Error: heap memory (6144 Kb) exhausted [needed 3125 Kb more]
	   See "help(Memory)" on how to increase the heap size.

but it *is*, and it's
matrix' fault.  (it constructs  x, i.e. effectively doubles it's argument).

----

There seem to be worse problems when use 

      var(x)

and x is one of those huge  n x p  matrices...

--------
Of course there are problems like these to be optimized -- ``everywhere''.
Any proposals for a general approach?

Martin
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