see memory usage of the computer vs of memory usage of R in Rstudio?

Question

I know I can check the size of an R object using object.size, but how do I check the total memory usage of R, the memory composition in R - in Rstudio?

I saw this post, but didn't find a Memory usage button under the Tools menu.

I'm using Rstudio V 0.99.896 and R V 3.2.5.

Specific context:

I look at Windows Task Manager when working with R, and I notice the memory usage of the computer increased by ~7G when I read.table a ~2G data into R.

Answer 1

Use gc() The help file says

The primary purpose of calling gc is for the report on memory usage.

My understanding is that the

• second column "Used (MB)"
• second row "VCells"

is the most important (human readable) number to check the total amount of memory that R is currently using. You can test this as follows in a fresh session:

gc(verbose=TRUE)
temp <- numeric(1e9)
gc(verbose=TRUE)

The remaining two (human readable) columns describe when automatic garbage collection is triggered and the maximum amount of memory that has been used in the current session.

Answer 2

Check out pryr::mem_used().

This should tell you how much RAM all the objects in a particular R session are using.

This should work in RStudio as well as base R.

Here's some more details from Hadley:

http://adv-r.had.co.nz/memory.html#gc