Making use of swap partition in R

Question

I have a laptop with 4GB of RAM. However, I would like to load/create objects into R that necessitate >4GB memory. I have enough swap space on my HD (5GB) to handle this. However, I do not believe that R enables me by default to make use of this swap space. Is there any way I can implement paging, specifically for R?

NB. For speed reasons, I'd much prefer to look beyond RAM and manual memory management. I'm using Linux.

Answer 1

You may want to check out the ff package here:

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ff/index.html