Re: [igraph] Memory Issues?

[Tamas Nepusz]

Dear Gang,

> I have been running community analysis. I noticed after i ran walk  
> trap, fast greedy and spin glass, R takes up to 1.7G of memory and  
> never releases that memory.
> After I saved and reloaded the objects, R only takes 30 Mb of mem.
> Is it because it didn't release memory in intermediate steps?

I'm not really familiar with the internal memory handling of R. Either  
there is a memory leak somewhere in the igraph library (I'm almost  
sure it's not in the C layer, since we check that regularly, and  
although there are some minor leaks, but none of them would explain  
the memory usage you encountered), or R does not give that memory back  
to the operating system for some reason. (I encountered something  
similar with Python: the Python interpreter is somewhat reluctant to  
give memory back to the OS in the hope that it can make use of it  
later). Maybe Gabor can give a better explanation.
In the meanwhile, can you try isolating which function call causes the  
leak? Try to load the graph, run one of the algorithms and check the  
memory usage. Then run another one and check it again, and so on...

Thanks,
--
Tamas