Extend memory size limit in R

Question

I have a R program that combines 10 files each file is of size 296MB and I have increased the memory size to 8GB (Size of RAM)

--max-mem-size=8192M
         


        

Answer 1

I suggest incorporating the suggestions in ?read.csv2:

Memory usage:

 These functions can use a surprising amount of memory when reading
 large files.  There is extensive discussion in the ‘R Data
 Import/Export’ manual, supplementing the notes here.

 Less memory will be used if ‘colClasses’ is specified as one of
 the six atomic vector classes.  This can be particularly so when
 reading a column that takes many distinct numeric values, as
 storing each distinct value as a character string can take up to
 14 times as much memory as storing it as an integer.

 Using ‘nrows’, even as a mild over-estimate, will help memory
 usage.

 Using ‘comment.char = ""’ will be appreciably faster than the
 ‘read.table’ default.

 ‘read.table’ is not the right tool for reading large matrices,
 especially those with many columns: it is designed to read _data
 frames_ which may have columns of very different classes.  Use
 ‘scan’ instead for matrices.