Advanced R

18

Memory

A solid understanding of R’s memory management will help you predict how much memory you’ll need for a given task and help you to make the most of the memory you have. It can even help you write faster code because accidental copies are a major cause of slow code. The goal of this chapter is to help you understand the basics of memory management in R, moving from individual objects to functions to larger blocks of code. Along the way, you’ll learn about some common myths, such as that you need to call gc() to free up memory, or that for loops are always slow.

Outline

• Section 18.1 shows you how to use object_size() to see how much memory an object occupies, and uses that as a launching point to improve your understanding of how R objects ...