limiting memory usage in R under linux

Question

We are running R in a linux cluster environment. The head node has had a few hangs when a user has inadvertently taken all the memory using an R process. Is there a way to limit R memory usage under linux? I'd rather not suggest global ulimits, but that may be the only way forward.

Answer 1

There's unix::rlimit_as() that allows setting memory limits for a running R process using the same mechanism that is also used for ulimit in the shell. Windows and macOS not supported.

In my .Rprofile I have

unix::rlimit_as(1e12, 1e12)

to limit memory usage to ~12 GB.

Before that...

I had created a small R package, ulimit with similar functionality.

Install it from GitHub using

devtools::install_github("krlmlr/ulimit")

To limit the memory available to R to 2000 MiB, call:

ulimit::memory_limit(2000)

Now:

> rep(0L, 1e9)
Error: cannot allocate vector of size 3.7 Gb