Matthew, contrary to the subject this has nothing to do with R, you are just making incorrect assumptions about memory types in OS X. Please consider reading the appropriate documentation: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/ManagingMemory/Articles/AboutMemory.html Inactive pages still need to be paged out when more resident RAM is requested. Also it is not R who is swapping anyway ...
Cheers, Simon On Feb 22, 2008, at 12:08 PM, Matthew Keller wrote: > Hello all, > > I am not certain whether this issue pertains to the Leopard OS or to R > or some combination. I have been running 64 bit R for the first time > over the last couple of weeks and so am still learning the ins and > outs of it. I have 18GB RAM on a 3.0 2008 Mac Pro. My R version is > posted below. > >> From the "top" command in terminal, I'm showing 5GB of inactive RAM. >> From the Leopard Activity Monitor page, with regard to inactive > memory, it says "This information [inactive RAM] is no longer being > used and has been cached to disk, but it will remain in RAM until > another application needs the space. Leaving this information in RAM > is to your advantage if you (or a client of your computer) come back > to it later." > > However, yesterday R accessed 12GB RAM and then started swapping to > hard drive (the pageouts went from 0 to 327000), all the while that > 5GB inactive RAM just sat right where it was. I had been expecting R > to access this inactive RAM once it ran out of free RAM rather than > swapping to hard drive. I can't believe that the Leopard OS is this > inefficient with memory allocation, so I'm guessing I'm not > understanding something. Does anyone understand why this might be > happening, and/or have any ideas about how to get R to access that > inactive memory? > > Thank you! > > Matt > > > > > > >> sessionInfo() > R version 2.6.2 alpha (2008-01-29 r44238) > i386-apple-darwin9.1.0 > > locale: > C > > attached base packages: > [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base > > loaded via a namespace (and not attached): > [1] tools_2.6.2 >> R.Version() > $platform > [1] "i386-apple-darwin9.1.0" > > $arch > [1] "i386" > > $os > [1] "darwin9.1.0" > > $system > [1] "i386, darwin9.1.0" > > $status > [1] "alpha" > > $major > [1] "2" > > $minor > [1] "6.2" > > $year > [1] "2008" > > $month > [1] "01" > > $day > [1] "29" > > $`svn rev` > [1] "44238" > > $language > [1] "R" > > $version.string > [1] "R version 2.6.2 alpha (2008-01-29 r44238)" > > -- > Matthew C Keller > Asst. Professor of Psychology > University of Colorado at Boulder > www.matthewckeller.com > > _______________________________________________ > R-SIG-Mac mailing list > [email protected] > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac > > _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Mac mailing list [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-mac
