On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Thomas Lumley wrote: > On Tue, 9 Dec 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > Thanks for the reply. So are you saying that multiple calls to gc() frees > > up memory to Windows and then other processes can use that newly freed > > memory? > > No. You typically can't free memory back to Windows (or many other OSes).
At least using R under Windows NT/2000/XP you can. I've watched it do so whilst fixing memory leaks. There is another complication here: R for Windows uses a third-party malloc, and you can free memory back to that if not to the OS. The reason Windows is special is the issue of fragmentation, which OSes using mmap (and R-devel under Windows) typically do not suffer. -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
