[Rd] [R] Problem with file size

[Henrik Bengtsson]

[Moved to r-devel for further discussion, bcc:ed r-help for the record]

Hi Benilton,

it is possible that this has to do with so called unevaluated
promises.  I had a similar problem a few months ago. I emailed R-devel
about it - "[Rd] save() saves extra stuff if object is not evaluated"
(Thu May 25 09:19:28 CEST 2006) [
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2006-May/037859.html ], and
Luke Tierney gave a very good explanation on what was going on.  Since
then save() has gained an extra argument 'eval.promises=TRUE', cf. R
v2.4.0 NEWS [ http://cran.at.r-project.org/ ]:

    o	save() by default evaluates promise objects.  The old behaviour
	(to save the promise and its evaluation environment) can be
	obtained by setting the new argument 'eval.promises' to FALSE.
	(Note that this does not apply to promises embedded in
	objects, only to top-level objects.)

You are already running R v2.4.0 so this should apply to your session
already.  However, note the last sentense in parentheses; it does not
handle promises in embedded objects. You could try to evaluate your
environments/promises manually using, say, is.null(env) (as I did in
my example in my May message) and see if it makes a difference.

Hope this helps

Henrik

On 11/14/06, Benilton Carvalho <bcarvalh at jhsph.edu> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I have 2 environments (2 different R sessions) as described below:
>
> Session 1:
>
> Name of the environment: "CrlmmInfo"
> Objects in the environment:
>     index1: logical index - length 238304
>     index2: logical index - length 238304
>     priors: list of 4 - (matrix 6x6, 2 vectors of length 6, vector of
> length 2) - all num
>     params: list of 4:
>           centers [238304 x 3 x 2]: num
>           scales [238304 x 3 x 2]: num
>           N [238304 x 3]: num
>           f0 [scalar]: num
>
> If I save this environment to a file, I get a file of 23MB. Great.
>
> Session 2:
>      Analogous to "Session 1", but replace 238304 by 262264.
>
> If I save the environment on Session 2, I get a file of 8.4GB.
>
> I applied object.size on each of the objects in each environment, and
> this is what I got:
>
> For Session 1:
> index1: 16204864
> index2: 16204864
> priors: 3336
> params: 74353584
>
> For Session 2:
> index1: 1049096
> index2: 1049096
> priors: 3336
> params: 81829104
>
> Is this increase from 23MB to 8.4GB expected to happen?
>
> Benilton
>
> sessionInfo() on both sessions is identical:
>
>  > sessionInfo()
> R version 2.4.0 (2006-10-03)
> x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
>
> locale:
> LC_CTYPE=en_US.iso885915;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=en_US.iso885915;LC_COLLATE
> =en_US.iso885915;LC_MONETARY=en_US.iso885915;LC_MESSAGES=en_US.iso885915
> ;LC_PAPER=en_US.iso885915;LC_NAME=C;LC_ADDRESS=C;LC_TELEPHONE=C;LC_MEASU
> REMENT=en_US.iso885915;LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] "methods"   "stats"     "graphics"  "grDevices" "utils"
> "datasets"
> [7] "base"
>
>  > version
>                 _
> platform       x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
> arch           x86_64
> os             linux-gnu
> system         x86_64, linux-gnu
> status
> major          2
> minor          4.0
> year           2006
> month          10
> day            03
> svn rev        39566
> language       R
> version.string R version 2.4.0 (2006-10-03)
>
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