One more test: quite by accident, after typing rm(foo)
I invoked the help function, i.e. ?matrix (or ?anything_valid) and R freed up most of the memory allocated to foo. Hope this helps. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: How to free up system memory? Date: Mon, 02 May 2011 19:28:32 -0400 From: Carl Witthoft <[email protected]> To: [email protected] <[email protected]> I'm not sure exactly what's happening, so I'll try to describe the steps in detail. I get the same behavior with R 2.12.1 and R 2.13, OSX 10.6.6 or 10.6.4 . First, I boot up Activity Monitor and set it to show memory usage. I create a large object (in the R Console of R.app GUI) , such as foo<-runif(1e8) and the "real memory" in the table and "active memory" in the pie chart go up. No surprise. Then I get rid of foo, rm(foo) But the memory allocations don't change. Looks like a memory leak? Two other things I found: 1) If I write a function that does nothing but create some big objects like that, and then deletes them, ActivityMonitor shows memory allocated to R and then freed up. This is what I'd expect from the R.app GUI as well. 2) If I boot several other applications, using up all my RAM, at some point the operating system moves some of R's active memory into virtual memory. Now the funny thing: if I make R the foreground app, or if I simply quit all the other apps, R does not get its active memory allocation back. The 'pie chart' shows memory has been freed, not just "inactive" . Did I set some bad parameter in one of my config files? Is there some way within R to force all that memory to be freed up (other than quitting and restarting R)? Thanks for your help -- I'm not the least put out if someone wants to point out what a dummy I'm being. Carl _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Mac mailing list [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
