In the last post where I described one issue related to usage of R’s data structures inside C++ code. The problem was caused by memory management system in R, which allows R to store two variables in the same place in the memory just after making an assignment.

See the following snippet:

#include <Rcpp.h>
#include <vector>

// [[Rcpp::plugins(cpp11)]]
// [[Rcpp::export]]
void change(Rcpp::NumericVector x) {
  // The C++ function does not return anything (it's void),
  // it only modifies the first element of the vector.
  x.at(0) = 1000.0;
}

x <- c(1,2,3)
y <- x
# x and y have the same values
x

## [1] 1 2 3

y

## [1] 1 2 3

In C++ this might cause problems because C++ does not take into account that changing variable’s value affects other variables which temporary shares the same space in the memory.

But in this post, I’m leaving C++ for a moment, and I will focus on R.

Passing parameters to functions.

The memory management system used in R can save a lot of memory in function calls. The new variable used inside a function can share the same space as an input variable as long as no other value is assigned inside the function body.

library(pryr)

xx <- rnorm(1e7)
fnc <- function(val) {
  # address does not work well inside functions
  # so it is better to use inspect
  inspect(val)$address
}
fnc(xx) == address(xx)

## [1] TRUE

Note that xx is pretty big - it occupies about 80mb.

Lists

Lists is a fascinating structure because it allows storing arbitrary elements. It can contain vector, models or even other lists.

They have another, but essential property - when the element is inserted into the list, it is not copied, but it behaves like any other variables. It means that items in a list can share the same place in the memory as standard variables.

I can quite easily show this property by creating a list with 10^6 repetitions of vector xx (which has 80mb). Without sharing the same space in memory, such list would be 80TB… I don’t have such amount of RAM on my laptop;)

xx <- rnorm(1e7)
big.list <- list()
object_size(xx)

## 80 MB

n <- 1000000
object_size(xx) * n

## 80 TB

# Memory in my lap:
system2("cat", args = "/proc/meminfo", stdout = TRUE)[1]

## [1] "MemTotal:        8036864 kB"

for(i in 1:n) {
  big.list[[i]] <- xx  
}

big.addres <- inspect(big.list)
big.addres <- vapply(big.addres$children, FUN.VALUE = "", "[[", "address")

# All element point to the same space in the memory:
unique(big.addres)

## [1] "0x7fb3dcd52010"

# ... which is the same space as the original xx variable
address(xx)

## [1] "0x7fb3dcd52010"

Summary.

List’s elements behave in pretty similar fashion as other variables, so you can put larger variables inside them without worrying about memory. R is not bad in saving memory;)