From hin-tak.leung at cimr.cam.ac.uk  Mon Jan 23 12:15:18 2006
From: hin-tak.leung at cimr.cam.ac.uk (Hin-Tak Leung)
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2006 11:15:18 +0000
Subject: [Rd] Minumum memory requirements to run R.
In-Reply-To: <43FA4711.2010103@gmail.com>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.61.0601181149400.9400@gannet.stats>
	<43FA4711.2010103@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <43D4BAC6.2050904@cimr.cam.ac.uk>

Kjetil Brinchmann Halvorsen wrote:
> Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> 
>>Quite a while back we set the goal of running R in 16Mb RAM, as people (I 
>>think Kjetil) had teaching labs that small.
> 
> It's a while since I actually har R used on such small machines, I think
> 64 MB is quite acceptable now.

May I add another note to this - I recently upgraded to 64-bits (AMD 
opteron) and noticed the memory foot print of R has shot up. Just 
starting R takes up 90+MB virtual. There are correponding increases with 
Python and Perl as well; I suspect R suffers a bit on 64-bit
platform due to extensive use of pointers internally. The fundamental
unit in R, SEXP, is 6 pointers + 1 int, (and another
pointer for itself). So I would probably say 64MB is questionable on 
64-bit, but then probably nobody is stupid enough to do that...

For those who want to investigate the equivalent in Perl, the equivalent 
perl headers corresponding to "R/include/Rinternals.h" is located at
the "-I" flags of the output of:

perl -MExtUtils::Embed -e ccopts

(no idea where python stores its stuff...)

Hin-Tak Leung

> 
> Kjetil
> 
> 
>>Since then R has grown, and we has recently started to optimize R for 
>>speed rather than size.  I recently tested R-devel on my ancient Win98 
>>notebook with 64Mb RAM -- it ran but startup was rather slow on what I 
>>think is a 233MHz processor and very slow disc.
>>
>>R still runs in 16Mb, but that is getting tight.  Does anyone have any 
>>need to run on a smaller machine than my 64Mb notebook?
>>
> 
> 
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[Rd] Minumum memory requirements to run R.
Hin-Tak Leung