Garbage Collection

Usage

gc(verbose = .Options$verbose)
gcinfo(verbose)

Arguments

verbose logical; if TRUE, the garbage collection prints statistics about cons cells [in Bytes] and the vector heap [in KBytes].

Value

A call of gc causes a garbage collection to take place. This usually takes place automagically without user intervention. gc returns a 2*2 matrix with rows "Ncells" (cons cells) and "Vcells" (vector cells), and columns "free" and "total".

The associated function gcinfo sets a flag so that automatic collection is either silent (verbose=FALSE) or prints memory use statistics (verbose=TRUE).

See Also

Memory on R's memory management and gctorture if you are an R hacker.

Examples

gc() #- do it now
gcinfo(TRUE) #-- in the future, show when you do it
x <- integer(0); for(i in 1:18) x _ c(x,i,x)
gcinfo(verbose = FALSE)#-- don't show it anymore

( rgc <- gc(TRUE) )
(100*rgc[,"free"])%/% rgc[,"total"] # the percentages
rgc[2,"free"]/ (1024 / 8) # free vector heap in K bytes

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