Memory in R⚑

R breaks down memory usage into Vcells (memory used by vectors) and Ncells (memory used by everything else).

However, neither this distinction nor the gc trigger and max used columns are typically important. What we’re usually most interested in is the the first column: the total memory used.

A helpful function one can use for this is pryr::mem_used which wraps around gc() to return the total amount of memory (in megabytes) currently used by R.

pryr::object_size() is another helpful function which works similarly to utils::object.size() but counts more accurately and includes the size of environments.

pryr::compare_size makes it easy to compare the output of object_size and object.size.

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Links: MOC - R | RStudio Configuration Notes