[R] Memory use in R

[DM2010]

Dear R Users

I have two questions about how R makes use of memory on a Windows computer.

On my machine certain R jobs seem to stop with messages such as...
"Error: cannot allocate vector of size 215.0 Mb"
...when, according to Windows Task Manager, there are still hundreds of
megabytes of physical memory available. These jobs usually stop when the
peak commit charge is around 2.6GB (in Windows-speak the "commit charge" is
all the memory allocated by system, drivers, applications etc.).

Machine characteristics

Processor: Pentium-D
4GB of installed memory (Task Manager reports 3584MB = 4GB - 512MB total
memory)
Windows booted with /3GB switch
R started with --max-mem-size=3071M
memory.limit() as reported by R: 3071

My questions are:
1. When it starts, does R ask the system to allocate memory for it in a
single chunk?
2. Can R allocate memory either side of the system-preallocated memory in
the middle of address space?

Best wishes

David Max
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