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rperformancememorymemory-managementout-of-memory

Measure peak memory usage in R

I want to measure my peak memory usage in R so that I can allocate resources appropriately. The method must include intermediate objects created during the analysis. For example, mx is a 80-Mb object created on every loop of lapply but never saved as a global variable. The peak memory usage should be at least 80Mb above baseline.

gc(reset = TRUE)
sum(gc()[, "(Mb)"]) # 172Mb

lapply(1:3, function(x) {
  mx <- rnorm(1e7) # 80Mb object
  mean(mx)
})

sum(gc()[, "(Mb)"]) # still 172Mb!
Solution

  • I found what I was looking for in the peakRAM package. From the documentation:

    This package makes it easy to monitor the total and peak RAM used so that developers can quickly identify and eliminate RAM hungry code.

    mem <- peakRAM({
  for(i in 1:5) {
    mean(rnorm(1e7))
  }
})
mem$Peak_RAM_Used_MiB # 10000486MiB