[Rd] memory trouble

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 4 Jan 2001, Martin Maechler wrote:

> In spite of Brian's good points, 
> I believe we should help the users more.
> 
> R-1.1.1 --vanilla     had
> 
>   rnorm(1e7)
> 
>   >> Error: heap memory (6144 Kb) exhausted [needed 78125 Kb more]
>   >>       See "help(Memory)" on how to increase the heap size.
> 
> which is much more helpful
> than the
> 
>   >> Error: cannot allocate vector of size 39062 Kb
> 
> that R-1.2.0  reports  (much much more rarely though, 
> 		        I couldn't reproduce it in a few tries !)

The error is different: it is coming from inside malloc.  Under those
circumstances you really can't do much, in particular nothing that needs
memory allocation.

This is not a question of the heap being exhausted: it is a question of
the process having fit its limits.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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