On windows XP | start | Control Panel | System | Advanced | Performance | Settings | Advanced | Virtual Memory | and select No Pagefile. I suspect Vista is similar.
John 2009/6/26 Prof. John C Nash <nas...@uottawa.ca>: > In order to run some performance tests on optimization tools, I want to be > able > to avoid the use of swap memory. In *nix systems, at least Linux ones, I can > issue > a 'sudo swapoff -a' command and use just the RAM available. If I don't do > this, at > some point swap will be used, the disk goes ballistic and the machine is > unresponsive > because it is thrashing data to the swap. I suspect others have encountered > this > too. Clearly I'd rather fail out than get into the thrashing situation. > Generally I > prefer no swap -- memory is cheap enough that it is easier not to worry > about these > sorts of woes. However, I'd like to make packages I'm developing > bullet-proof. > > What I need to know is if there are similar facilities on other platforms > and how to > use them. I see memory.size and memory.limit for Windows -- making R less > platform > independent -- and they seem to work on a WinXP virtual machine I have > available. > However, I suspect that the memory.limit includes the swap. When I was > running > Windoze, I tried valiantly to get the PageFile.sys killed and found it kept > being set > up again despite following all the recommended steps. (I needed to avoid the > plaintext of an encrypted file being "saved" for me!) I know nothing about > Mac > swap and how to control it. > > Advice welcome. Below is a crude but self-contained example. > > John Nash > > ## memcrash.R -- try to hit the wall with memory > > cat("memcrash.R -- try to hit the wall\n") > cat("You should have swap turned off\n") > temp<-readline("Do you?") > if (temp != "y") stop("Fix swap") > > for (j in 1:10) { > n <- 5^j > cat("building matrix of order ",n,"\n") > A<-matrix(nrow=n, ncol=n) > } # end loop > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > -- John C Frain Economics Department Trinity College Dublin Dublin 2 Ireland www.tcd.ie/Economics/staff/frainj/home.html mailto:fra...@tcd.ie mailto:fra...@gmail.com ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.