[R] R Memory Usage Concerns

[Eduardo Leoni]

And, by the way, factors take up _more_ memory than character vectors.

> object.size(sample(c("a","b"), 1000, replace=TRUE))
4088 bytes
> object.size(factor(sample(c("a","b"), 1000, replace=TRUE)))
4296 bytes


On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 11:35 PM, jim holtman <jholtman at gmail.com> wrote:
> When you read your file into R, show the structure of the object:
>
> str(tab)
>
> also the size of the object:
>
> object.size(tab)
>
> This will tell you what your data looks like and the size taken in R.
> Also in read.table, use colClasses to define what the format of the
> data is; may make it faster.  You might want to force a garbage
> collection 'gc()' to see if that frees up any memory.  If your input
> is about 2M lines and it looks like there are three column (alpha,
> numeric, numeric), I would guess that you will probably have an
> object.size of about 50MB.  This information would help.
>
>
>