RStudio Desktop absorbs all RAM

[Faber993]

Hi,

I have updated to RStudio v. 1.4.1717 a few months ago.

Since then, RStudio absorbs a very large portion of my laptop RAM even for very simple tasks. Simply having the app open absorbs about 1GB of RAM. If I perform simple tasks (e.g. reading a 500 MB csv file and do some plots) it easily consumes ~ 2GB of RAM. If I perform more intensive computations (e.g., numerical optimization or monte carlo simulations) it consumes up to ~4/5 GB of RAM (out of 16 in total). If this happens, the laptop overheats and drains battery.

Below you find a screenshot of RStudio memory usage for a fairly basic task (for which RStudio did not use to absorb that much RAM in the past).

I tried to downgrade to RStudio v. 1.3.1093, but the problem still persists.

I wonder if you have any idea of what is happening.

Below you find more details about my machine:

 version  R version 4.0.5 (2021-03-31)
 os       Windows 10 x64              
 system   x86_64, mingw32             
 ui       RStudio                     
 language (EN)                        
 collate  English_Europe.1252         
 ctype    English_Europe.1252         
 tz       Europe/Paris                
 date     2021-06-16

In case it helps, my typical workflow is as follows. I store data on a cloud, import and manipulate them in RStudio, and do version control with Github (I use Github desktop). Do you think that the interaction between RStudio and the clouds and/or Github may create conflicts?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[thiagoj]

I have noticed something similar and maybe it is related to your problem.

I was writing a rmarkdown report, wrote pages and pages of text and all was going well, and I knitted all kinds of output without problems. When I loaded the first packages (tidyverse and plan) and created one very small data.frame (5 obs and 3 vars) and a plot, RStudio (not R, according to Windows Task Manager) would eat up all the available RAM, to the point where Windows would stutter a little.

This was not the first time I noticed the high memory usage. It was just the first time I realized it could happen with next to nothing going on.

This is the first time I see a similar problem. Hopefully we will find an explanation.
I'm using R v 4.0.3 (but it happens since 3.xx), on Windows 10. RStudio is Version 1.4.1106 (also had the problem with previous version).

Reinstalling R or RStudio didn't help.

[Faber993]

Dear Thiago,

The two issues look related indeed. I haven't found a solution either. Another user also mentioned a similar problem and found a solution (Problems with Rstudio v1.4.1717 - #2 by Faber993). I tried that out too, but no luck so far.

Please keep me posted about any workaround you may discover. Hopefully, somebody else will read this thread and offer a way out.