人们使用什么技巧来管理交互式R会话的可用内存?我使用下面的函数[基于Petr Pikal和David Hinds在2004年发布的r-help列表]来列出(和/或排序)最大的对象,并偶尔rm()其中一些对象。但到目前为止最有效的解决办法是……在64位Linux下运行,有充足的内存。

大家还有什么想分享的妙招吗?请每人寄一份。

# improved list of objects
.ls.objects <- function (pos = 1, pattern, order.by,
                        decreasing=FALSE, head=FALSE, n=5) {
    napply <- function(names, fn) sapply(names, function(x)
                                         fn(get(x, pos = pos)))
    names <- ls(pos = pos, pattern = pattern)
    obj.class <- napply(names, function(x) as.character(class(x))[1])
    obj.mode <- napply(names, mode)
    obj.type <- ifelse(is.na(obj.class), obj.mode, obj.class)
    obj.size <- napply(names, object.size)
    obj.dim <- t(napply(names, function(x)
                        as.numeric(dim(x))[1:2]))
    vec <- is.na(obj.dim)[, 1] & (obj.type != "function")
    obj.dim[vec, 1] <- napply(names, length)[vec]
    out <- data.frame(obj.type, obj.size, obj.dim)
    names(out) <- c("Type", "Size", "Rows", "Columns")
    if (!missing(order.by))
        out <- out[order(out[[order.by]], decreasing=decreasing), ]
    if (head)
        out <- head(out, n)
    out
}
# shorthand
lsos <- function(..., n=10) {
    .ls.objects(..., order.by="Size", decreasing=TRUE, head=TRUE, n=n)
}

当前回答

Unfortunately I did not have time to test it extensively but here is a memory tip that I have not seen before. For me the required memory was reduced with more than 50%. When you read stuff into R with for example read.csv they require a certain amount of memory. After this you can save them with save("Destinationfile",list=ls()) The next time you open R you can use load("Destinationfile") Now the memory usage might have decreased. It would be nice if anyone could confirm whether this produces similar results with a different dataset.

其他回答

运行

for (i in 1:10) 
    gc(reset = T)

还可以帮助R释放未使用但仍未释放的内存。

这并没有增加上面的内容,而是以我喜欢的简单和大量注释的风格编写的。它生成一个对象大小排序表,但没有上面例子中给出的一些细节:

#Find the objects       
MemoryObjects = ls()    
#Create an array
MemoryAssessmentTable=array(NA,dim=c(length(MemoryObjects),2))
#Name the columns
colnames(MemoryAssessmentTable)=c("object","bytes")
#Define the first column as the objects
MemoryAssessmentTable[,1]=MemoryObjects
#Define a function to determine size        
MemoryAssessmentFunction=function(x){object.size(get(x))}
#Apply the function to the objects
MemoryAssessmentTable[,2]=t(t(sapply(MemoryAssessmentTable[,1],MemoryAssessmentFunction)))
#Produce a table with the largest objects first
noquote(MemoryAssessmentTable[rev(order(as.numeric(MemoryAssessmentTable[,2]))),])

这是个好把戏。

另一个建议是尽可能使用内存效率高的对象:例如,使用矩阵而不是data.frame。

这并没有真正解决内存管理问题,但是一个不为人所知的重要函数是memory.limit()。可以使用memory.limit(size=2500)命令增加默认值,这里的大小以MB为单位。正如Dirk提到的,为了真正利用这一点,您需要使用64位。

I'm fortunate and my large data sets are saved by the instrument in "chunks" (subsets) of roughly 100 MB (32bit binary). Thus I can do pre-processing steps (deleting uninformative parts, downsampling) sequentially before fusing the data set. Calling gc () "by hand" can help if the size of the data get close to available memory. Sometimes a different algorithm needs much less memory. Sometimes there's a trade off between vectorization and memory use. compare: split & lapply vs. a for loop. For the sake of fast & easy data analysis, I often work first with a small random subset (sample ()) of the data. Once the data analysis script/.Rnw is finished data analysis code and the complete data go to the calculation server for over night / over weekend / ... calculation.

For both speed and memory purposes, when building a large data frame via some complex series of steps, I'll periodically flush it (the in-progress data set being built) to disk, appending to anything that came before, and then restart it. This way the intermediate steps are only working on smallish data frames (which is good as, e.g., rbind slows down considerably with larger objects). The entire data set can be read back in at the end of the process, when all the intermediate objects have been removed.

dfinal <- NULL
first <- TRUE
tempfile <- "dfinal_temp.csv"
for( i in bigloop ) {
    if( !i %% 10000 ) { 
        print( i, "; flushing to disk..." )
        write.table( dfinal, file=tempfile, append=!first, col.names=first )
        first <- FALSE
        dfinal <- NULL   # nuke it
    }

    # ... complex operations here that add data to 'dfinal' data frame  
}
print( "Loop done; flushing to disk and re-reading entire data set..." )
write.table( dfinal, file=tempfile, append=TRUE, col.names=FALSE )
dfinal <- read.table( tempfile )