[Rd] R 2.14.1 memory management under Windows

[Joshua Wiley]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 10:14 PM, Spencer Graves
<spencer.graves at prodsyse.com> wrote:
> I computed "system.time(diag(30000))" with R 2.12.0 on Fedora 13 Linux with
> 4 GB RAM and with R 2.14.1 on Windows 7 with 8 GB RAM:
>
>
> Linux (4 GB RAM):  0, 0.21, 0.21 -- a fifth of a second
>
>
> Windows 7 (8 GB RAM):  11.37 7.47 93.19 -- over 1.5 minutes.  Moreover,
> during most of that time, I could not switch windows or get any response
> from the system.  When I first encountered this, I thought Windows was hung
> permanently and the only way out was a hard reset and reboot.
>
>
>      On both systems, diag(30000) generated, "Error:  cannot allocate vector
> of size ___ Gb", with "___" = 3.4 for Linux with 4 GB RAM and 6.7 for
> Windows with 8 GB RAM.  Linux with half the RAM and an older version of R
> was done with this in 0.21 seconds.  Windows 7 went into suspension for over
> 93 seconds -- 1.5 minutes before giving an error message.
>
>
>       I don't know how easy this would be to fix under Windows, but I felt a
> need to report it.

This seems like it may be an issue with paging, which Windows has
traditionally not excelled at.  That said, on Windows 7 x64 with 6GB
RAM and another 6GB paging file with R version 2.14.1 (2011-12-22), I
get:

> system.time(diag(30000))
Error: cannot allocate vector of size 3.4 Gb
Timing stopped at: 0.01 0 0.01


Cheers,

Josh

so the timing is comparable to nix.
>
>
>      Best Wishes,
>      Spencer
>
>
> --
> Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
> President and Chief Technology Officer
> Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
> 751 Emerson Ct.
> San José, CA 95126
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>
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-- 
Joshua Wiley
Ph.D. Student, Health Psychology
Programmer Analyst II, Statistical Consulting Group
University of California, Los Angeles
https://joshuawiley.com/