R memory issues after reinstall

Question

I have been running several R scripts without issue until one day I tried to open RStudio and it said "Fatal error: unable to open base package in R." I uninstalled and reinstalled both R and RStudio, which solved that issue. However, now when I run one of the R scripts that I had been running previously, I get a "cannot allocate vector of size" error (this is a modeling script with several models and iterations).

Additionally, when I try to load a very large dataset, I was previously able to load it with the line memory.limit(size=18000). Now, it doesn't let me set it to anything above 4000, so I cannot load the dataset. I get the error "Error in memory.limit(size=18000): don't be silly!: your machine has a 4Gb address limit"

I am currently running RStudio 2021.09.2 and R 4.1.2. Before the reinstall, I believe I was running RStudio 1.4.1106 and R 4.1.0.

Thank you.

Answer 1

I had a very similar issue, and it turned out that after updating RStudio, it defaulted to using the 32-bit version of R instead of the 64-bit one. Once I switched it to the 64-bit one in RStudio, the memory issue stopped.

To do this, in RStudio on Windows go to Tools > Global Options and then change the R version... drop-down to the appropriate one installed on your system.