[R] Lower performance execution in read.table() in R-1.4.0 vs. R-1.3.1.. ?

[Carlos Ortega]

Dear R-Help,

I have been trying to read a file (66000 x 12 - ~ 10 Mb) in R-1.4.0 (W2000)
getting error messages associated with the memory usage.
I got a similar problem running on a Linux box (Mandrake 8.1 - PII 350 MHz,
160 Mb RAM).

Luckily, I still had available the previous version R-1.3.1 in my Windows
box, and when trying to read the same file, I do not get any particular
problem, and even the response times are comparable to what I get on
S-Plus2000 in the same machine.

Please, do you know anything about the existence of this difference in
performance/execution ? Is there any way to handle with R-1.4.0 ?

Thanks in advance,
Carlos Ortega.

P.S: Attached are the error messages I got when reading the table as well as
the specifics generated by R.Version() on my Windows machine.

++++++Error Message ++++++++++++
> x<-read.table("C:\\Cof\\Datos\\posresult.txt",as.is=T,dec=",")
Error: cannot allocate vector of size 62 Kb
In addition: Warning message:
Reached total allocation of 256Mb: see help(memory.size)

++++++R.Version()+++++++++++++++
> R.Version()
$platform
[1] "i386-pc-mingw32"

$arch
[1] "x86"

$os
[1] "Win32"

$system
[1] "x86, Win32"

$status
[1] ""

$major
[1] "1"

$minor
[1] "4.0"

$year
[1] "2001"

$month
[1] "12"

$day
[1] "19"

$language
[1] "R"
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


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