On 07/17/2018 12:56 PM, Joshua Ulrich wrote:
This looks like a case of FAQ 7.42:
https://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html#Why-is-R-apparently-not-releasing-memory_003f
Yes. A true memory leak in R would mean that repeated execution of the same code (e.g. creation and deletion of the list) would start failing due to running out of memory at some (high) iteration number.

Also, gc(verbose=TRUE, full=TRUE) run before and after the code snippet suggests there is no leak. Well, a little bit of memory could be added initially (e.g. byte-compilation, some internal caching at different levels) - and this is why "high iteration number" above - but eventually the memory use in cons cells and vectors should become constant and it does on my system.

Tomas
On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 2:32 PM, Daniel Raduta <datu...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,

I am experiencing a very noticeable memory leak when using large lists of
large data. The code below creates a list of matrices, yet the memory does
not free up after removing that item and performing a garbage collection.
Is there a something I can do to prevent this memory leak? Any help would
be greatly appreciated. By the way, if you execute the code, please run it
in a new R session.

# Start of code
================================================================

# Function that returns memory being used
MemoryUsed <- function(){
   pid <- Sys.getpid()
   system(paste0("top -n 1 -p ", pid, " -b"), intern = TRUE)[c(7,8)]
}

# Initial memory (VIRT memory equals about 400,000 bytes on my machine)
MemoryUsed()

# Create a large list of large data, remove it, and perform garbarge
collection
ncols <- 100
nrows <- 10000
mat <- matrix(seq(nrows * ncols), nrow = nrows, ncol = ncols)
ls <- lapply(1:1000, function(x) as.data.frame(mat))
rm(list = setdiff(ls(), 'MemoryUsed'))
invisible(gc())

# Final memory (now, VIRT memory equals about 4,600,000 bytes on my machine)
MemoryUsed()

# End of code
==================================================================

My session info is:

R version 3.4.4 (2018-03-15)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS

Matrix products: default
BLAS: /usr/lib/libblas/libblas.so.3.6.0
LAPACK: /usr/lib/lapack/liblapack.so.3.6.0

locale:
  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C
LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
  [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C
  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_3.4.4 tools_3.4.4    yaml_2.1.19

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