I'm new to programming with R. I'm currently taking a course for data analytics through coursera and I'm working on the capstone project but I'm having issues with using too much ram. I am wondering if anyone knows if the desktop version of r has more ram availability than rstudio cloud. I've tried downloading r studio on my desktop but it wouldn't work but I'll troubleshoot more if that means I have more access to ram if it's a cloud thing. Any advice is great especially if you think i'm doing something wrong to take up so much ram.
It's hard to give a universal answer.
On your computer, the RAM available is... simply the amount of physical RAM that your computer has (minus the memory used by other programs). So if you have a computer with 8GB RAM, and your OS is using 2 GB, and your web browser is using 1 GB, then R can take up to 5 GB. And if you can close you browser you can go to 6 GB.
On RStudio Cloud (or should I say Posit Cloud yet), by default a new project gets 1 GB RAM. So that's a lot less than on most personal computers. If you go on top-right and click on "RAM", you might be able to increase the memory available for that project. But note that the memory you give your project is linked to billing, so if I'm not mistaken on a free account you can't really go over 1 GB.
And finally
well I don't know how much RAM you're using now, so no idea if it's "so much". And I don't know what the "capstone project" is, if it's a course on big data, then it would make sense that it needs big memory. If you're only using data.frames with a few thousand rows, then 1 GB could go a long way. In any case, any modern computer would have more than 1 GB RAM available.
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My sense is that 1 GB RAM severely limits the kind of work that is feasible even in the cloud where R and RStudio run on a server. On a local host, there are are many more programs running in the background than appear on the screen, and they all compete for memory. There are ways to program to minimize memory usage (for example, avoiding temporary objects) but a beginner is better off focusing on how to use R to solve the problems being studied.
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