Fixing pandoc "out of memory" error when running the profvis R package

Question

I'm trying to use the profvis package to do memory profiling of a large job in R (64 bit), run under RStudio, run under windows 7. profvis keeps crashing and I get an error message saying that Pandoc is out of memory. The message is copied below.

My understanding, and please correct me if this is wrong, is that the problem is likely to go away if I can set the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE switch on Pandoc. And to do that, I need to install a linker, etc., do my own build, after learning how to do all those things. Or, there is a shortcut, involving installing MS Visual Studio, running the editbin utility, and set the switch that way. However a new install of Visual Studio is unhappy on my machine, and demands that I fix some unspecified problem with Windows Management Instrumentation before it will go forward.

So my question is this: Is there a way to set the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE switch on Pandoc from inside R?

Answer 1

I had a similar problem and was able to resolve it by following the advice at https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/large-address-aware.112556/. See in the post where it has an Attached File called laa_2_0_4.zip. I downloaded it and ran the executable it contains. Basic mode was sufficient; I simply navigated to C:/Program Files/RStudio/bin/pandoc/pandoc and turned on the checkbox for Large Address Aware Flag (step 2), then did Commit Changes (step 3). After this, the profvis-invoked pandoc command eventually ran to success. I was able to watch pandoc's memory consumption in Task Manager rise up to a peak of about 2.7 GB.