R: Enable Profiling of R's Memory Use

Rprofmem {utils} | R Documentation

## Enable Profiling of R's Memory Use

### Description

Enable or disable reporting of memory allocation in R.

### Usage

    Rprofmem(filename = "Rprofmem.out", append = FALSE, threshold = 0)

### Arguments

`filename` | The file to be used for recording the memory allocations. Set to `NULL` or `""` to disable reporting.
`append` | logical: should the file be over-written or appended to?
`threshold` | numeric: allocations on R's "large vector" heap larger than this number of bytes will be reported.

### Details

Enabling profiling automatically disables any existing profiling to another or the same file.

Profiling writes the call stack to the specified file every time `malloc` is called to allocate a large vector object or to allocate a page of memory for small objects. The size of a page of memory and the size above which `malloc` is used for vectors are compile-time constants, by default 2000 and 128 bytes respectively.

The profiler tracks allocations, some of which will be to previously used memory and will not increase the total memory use of R.

### Value

None

### Note

The memory profiler slows down R even when not in use, and so is a compile-time option. (It is enabled in a standard Windows build of R.)

The memory profiler can be used at the same time as other R and C profilers.

### See Also

The R sampling profiler, `Rprof` also collects memory information.

`tracemem` traces duplications of specific objects.

The "Writing R Extensions" manual section on "Tidying and profiling R code"

### Examples

    ## Not run:
    ## not supported unless R is compiled to support it.
    Rprofmem("Rprofmem.out", threshold = 1000)
    example(glm)
    Rprofmem(NULL)
    noquote(readLines("Rprofmem.out", n = 5))

    ## End(Not run)

[Package utils version 4.0.5 Index]