How to check the amount of RAM in R

Question

I want to make a function that imports data in different numbers of batches depending on how much RAM is available on someone's system. But how can I find the amount of available RAM in R? I can use memory.size() but that only works for Windows.

Answer 1

Given the warnings concerning platform-dependency discussed in the earlier comment, you could for example parse /proc/meminfo on Linux:

$ grep MemFree /proc/meminfo  MemFree:          573660 kB $ awk '/MemFree/ {print $2}' /proc/meminfo  565464 

You could try the second approach via system(..., intern=TRUE), or even via a pipe connection.

Edit some 5+ years later: In R, and just following what the previous paragraph hinted at:

R> memfree <- as.numeric(system("awk '/MemFree/ {print $2}' /proc/meminfo",  +                               intern=TRUE)) R> memfree [1] 3342480 R>  

Answer 2

Now you can do that with benchmarkme::get_ram function.

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/benchmarkme/benchmarkme.pdf

Answer 3

I would recommend using memuse::Sys.meminfo().