[R] Using huge datasets

Thomas Lumley tlumley at u.washington.edu
Thu Feb 5 16:44:20 CET 2004


On Wed, 4 Feb 2004, Roger D. Peng wrote:

>
> As far as I know, R does not have a "memory limitation" --
> the only limit is the memory installed on your computer.
>

The only practical limitation is the pointer size of your machine, so
32-bit machine can't address more than 4Gb, and R probably won't get all
of that.

Further out, R will run into problems if you try to have a vector with
more than 2^31 elements (since length() returns an integer), and probably
if you have more than 2^31 objects.  I would guess that there are tighter
limitations implied by the .rda save format.

	-thomas




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