Rstudio keeps crashing w adequate core and RAM, small data frames

Posit Professional & Hosted Products Posit Cloud
1

Hi, all. I’m a newbie and I’m trying to do some really basic data cleaning, but Rstudio keeps crashing when I try to do really basic stuff like deleting columns and resaving the data frame under a different name. (example: write.csv(bike_trips_2019_Q2,"clean_bike_trips_2019_Q2.csv", row.names = FALSE))

I’m working with 4 data frames that range between 90 and 550 megabytes. The largest of these has a 1.5 million records.

Operating System: Windows 10
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3550 CPU @ 3.30GHz 3.30 GHz
RAM: 16.0 GB (15.9 GB usable)

I’m using Rstudio on Chrome.

Does anyone have any suggestions about what I can do to troubleshoot?

Thanks in advance!

2

This suggests you are using a server version of RStudio which doesn't use your local computational resources, can you clarify?

3

Thanks for replying to my question, andresrcs! :grinning:

Here is what I'm using:

RStudioVersion

In case you can't read the graphic for some reason, it reads:
"RStudio Workbench
2022.07.01 Build 554pro3"

Does that NOT use local resources? Can I solve my problem by somehow configuring Rstudio Workbench to use my local resources? If so, how would I do that? Or do I need to do something else?

4

RStudio Workbench is installed in your organization's servers and you access a Workbench session through a browser but the software runs on the server so it doesn't matter how much RAM you have available in your local system, you would need to ask your IT department to assign more memory for your user.

Since this is a paid RStudio product you could also contact customer support and I'm sure they would be happy to guide you through this.

5

Thanks for the info, andresrcs. That explains a lot.

I'm doing this project as a final project for a class I'm taking on Coursera, and also to use as the first piece in my portfolio before I go out looking for work.

So, basically, this is the free version of Rstudio Workbench, which explains why there is almost no memory assigned to it and it keeps crashing when I try to do perfectly normal stuff on not very large data sets. It's just enough to get through the class, but not enough to do realistic work.

I'm going to try to contact someone at Coursera to bump up the resources. We'll see how that goes.

Thanks for all your help andresrecs! :+1:

6

Actually there is no free version of RStudio Workbench, I think what you are really using is a free tier account of RStudio Cloud (which uses Workbench) and I got misleaded by the screenshot you posted, if that is the case then Coursera has nothing to do with this and the only way to increase computational resources in RStudio Cloud is to get a paid account and pay for them.

Usually when you get these "larger than memory" dataset on an assignment is for you to learn how to deal with them in real life, there are some options besides paying for more memory, but all depends on what exactly you have been asked to accomplish.

Maybe the simplest solution for you would be to use the open source desktop equivalent of Workbench, the RStudio IDE, which installs locally and uses your own computational resources.

7

Yep, exactly. I downloaded RStudio IDE and all of my problems magically disappeared. :smirk:

8

If your question's been answered (even by you!), would you mind choosing a solution? It helps other people see which questions still need help, or find solutions if they have similar problems. Here’s how to do it:

9

This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

If you have a query related to it or one of the replies, start a new topic and refer back with a link.