Forcing garbage collection to run in R with the gc() command
Periodically I program sloppily. Ok, I program sloppily all the time, but sometimes that catches up with me in the form of out of memory errors. I start exercising a little discipline in deleting objects with the rm() command and things get better. I see mixed messages online about whether I should explicitly call gc() after deleting large data objects. Some say that before R returns a memory error it will run gc() while others say that manually forcing gc is a good idea.
Should I run gc() after deleting large objects in order to ensure maximum memory availability?
Answer
"Probably." I do it too, and often even in a loop as in
cleanMem <- function(n=10) { for (i in 1:n) gc() }
Yet that does not, in my experience, restore memory to a pristine state.
So what I usually do is to keep the tasks at hand in script files and execute those using the 'r' frontend (on Unix, and from the 'littler' package). Rscript is an alternative on that other OS.
That workflow happens to agree with
- workflow-for-statistical-analysis-and-report-writing
- tricks-to-manage-the-available-memory-in-an-r-session
which we covered here before.