memuse

• Version: 2.4
• Status:
• License:
• Author: Drew Schmidt

Originally, this package was an over-engineered solution to a mostly non-existent problem, as a sort of love letter to other needlessly complex programs like the Enterprise Fizzbuzz

However, as of version 2.0, I'm sad to report that the package is actually becoming quite useful.

Package Utilities

The package comes with several classes of utilities. I find all of them very useful during the course of benchmarking, but some are certainly more useful than others.

Memory Lookups

With this package you can get some information about how much memory is physically available on the host machine:

Sys.meminfo()
# Totalram:  15.656 GiB 
# Freeram:   10.504 GiB 

Sys.meminfo(compact.free=FALSE) ### Linux and FreeBSD only
# Totalram:   15.656 GiB 
# Freeram:     1.067 GiB 
# Bufferram:   1.332 GiB 
# Cachedram:   8.207 GiB 

Sys.swapinfo() ## same as Sys.pageinfo()
# Totalswap:    32.596 GiB 
# Freeswap:     32.595 GiB 
# Cachedswap:  444.000 KiB 

You can find the ram usage of the current R process:

Sys.procmem()
# Size:  258.426 MiB 
# Peak:  258.426 MiB 

x <- rnorm(1e8)
object.size(x)
# 762.939 MiB

rm(x);invisible(gc())

Sys.procmem()
# Size:   258.426 MiB 
# Peak:  1021.363 MiB 

Also, if you're working close to the metal, you may be interested in seeing how large the CPU caches are and/or how big the cache linesize is:

Sys.cachesize()
# L1I:   32.000 KiB 
# L1D:   32.000 KiB 
# L2:   256.000 KiB 
# L3:     6.000 MiB 

Sys.cachelinesize()
# Linesize:  64 B 

Estimating Memory Usage

You can estimate memory storage requirements of a matrix without having to divide by some annoying power of 2:

howbig(10000, 500)
# 38.147 MiB

howbig(10000, 500, type="int")
# 19.073 MiB

howbig(10000, 500, representation="sparse", sparsity=.05)
# 1.907 MiB

Alternatively, given a (memory) size, you can also find the dimensions of such a matrix:

```r` howmany(mu(800, "mib"))

[1] 10240 10240

howmany(mu(800, "mib"), ncol=500)

[1] 209715 500

For more information, see the package vignette.


#### Misc

The package also has some miscellaneous helpful utilities:

```r
approx.size(12345)
# 12.3 Thousand
 
approx.size(123456789)
# 123.5 Million
 
approx.size(123456789, unit.names="short")
# 123.5m
 
approx.size(123456789, unit.names="comma")
# 123,456,789

Installation

devtools::install_github("wrathematics/memuse")

Software license and disclaimer

The R package is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or greater, basically as a joke (see the vignette for details). The C library 'meminfo' located in src/meminfo of the memuse package source tree is additionally licensed under the permissive 2-clause BSD license.

Authors

memuse is authored and maintained by:

• Drew Schmidt

With additional contributions from:

• Wei-Chen Chen
• Christian Heckendorf

We would also specially like to thank Dan Burgess for contributing a Mac for development and testing.