How to increase memory in R

Question

I am running R 64 bit on windows 7 64 bit. While running my script, I get an error message that cannot allocate a vector of size x (in my case about 200MB). My data.frame has about 200.000 rows, not more. How can it happen that there is not enough storage space to allocate another vector? I know that the operation itself works since the script runs through with a smaller, subsetted file.

I know too that this question has been asked before but none of the answers solved my problem. there are many different answers out-there which one is correct? Is it related to the RAM of the system or of the memory of R?

I increased the memory size manually:

memory.limit()
# set max memory usage is 2G
memory.size(max=10000)

Then r says that the memory limit is 10.000

memory.limit()
[1] 10000 

but still there is the same error. it is even the same size of the vector that cannot be allocated.

I cleaned up my computer and set more space free on my drive too. but it doesn´t change anything either.

On what is the memory size dependent and how can I increase it?

Answer 1

Like people have been commenting, one would need to see your actual code for more specific answers.

However, a couple of general things you could consider are:

i) using remove() or rm() functions within your script on auxiliary / intermediate objects / results

ii) read the help of the gc() function, which triggers the garbage collection explicitly (which should usually not be necessary but there are cases where this is justified)