Alternative to R's `memory.size()` in linux?
I think that this should be handled by the operating system. There is no built-in limit that I know of; if necessary, R will use all the memory that it can get.
To obtain information on the total and/or on the available memory in linux, you can try
system('grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo')
or
system('free -m')
or
system('lshw -class memory')
The last command will complain that you should run this as super-user and it will give a warning that the output may not be accurate; but from my experience it will still provide a fairly useful output.
To obtain information on the memory usage of a running R script one could either monitor the currently used resources by starting top
in a separate terminal, or use, e.g., the following system call from within the R script:
system(paste0("cat /proc/",Sys.getpid(),"/status | grep VmSize"))
Hope this helps.
Using pryr library:
library("pryr")
mem_used()
# 27.9 MB
x <- mem_used()
x
# 27.9 MB
class(x)
# [1] "bytes"
Result is the same as @RHertel's answer, with pryr we can assign the result into a variable.
system('grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo')
# MemTotal: 263844272 kB
To assign to a variable with system call, use intern = TRUE
:
x <- system('grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo', intern = TRUE)
x
# [1] "MemTotal: 263844272 kB"
class(x)
# [1] "character"