[Rd] .Call and to reclaim the memory by allocVector

[Seth Falcon]

Hi Yongchao,

Yongchao Ge <Yongchao.Ge at mssm.edu> writes:
> Why am I storing a large dataset in the R? My program consist of two 
> parts. The first part is to get the intermediate results, the computation 
> of which takes a lot of time. The second part contains many 
> different functions to manipulate the the intermediate 
> results.
>
> My current solution is to save intermediate result in a temporary file, 
> but my final goal is to to save it as an R object. The "memory leak" in 
> .Call stops me from doing this and I'd like to know if I can have a clean 
> solution for the R package I am writing.

There are many examples of packages that use .Call to create large
objects.  I don't think there is a "memory leak".

One thing that may be catching you up is that because of R's
pass-by-value semantics, you may be ending up with multiple copies of
the object on the R side during some of your operations.  I would
recommend recompiling with --enable-memory-profiling and using
tracemem() to see if you can identify places where copies of your
large object are occurring.  You can also take a look at
Rprof(memory.profile=TRUE).

+ seth


-- 
Seth Falcon | Computational Biology | Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
BioC: http://bioconductor.org/
Blog: http://userprimary.net/user/