Question

I am running my code in R (under Windows) which involves a lot of in-memory data. I tried to use rm(list=ls()) to clean up memory, but seems the memory is still occupied and I cannot rerun my code. I tried to close the R and restart R again, but it is the same. It seems that memory is still occupied, as when I run the code, it says it can’t allocate memory (but it could at the first time). The memory only seems to get cleaned up after I restart my PC.

Is there any way to clean up the memory so that I can rerun my code without restarting my PC every time?

Answer 1

Maybe you can try to use the function gc(). A call of gc() causes a garbage collection to take place. It can be useful to call gc() after a large object has been removed, as this may prompt R to return memory to the operating system.
gc() also return a summary of the occupy memory.