r - Unable to install.packages(): system call failed: Cannot allocate memory; installation of package had non-zero exit status

Question

I'm using R version 3.1.2 (2014-10-31) -- "Pumpkin Helmet" on Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit).

I have an issue installing new packages in R, using RStudio. When I call the install.packages() function, I get:

Warning in install.packages :
system call failed: Cannot allocate memory
Warning in install.packages :
installation of package ‘pastecs’ had non-zero exit status

The downloaded source packages are in
‘/tmp/Rtmpi0toFl/downloaded_packages’

I have installed R via shell commands and it worked ok. I've also decreased the swappiness value to 10, but I'm not sure if it has anything to do with the problem.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I figured out. I was all about the swap value.
There are several web pages that advice to decrease the default swap use in order to speed up Ubuntu. What I did to fix the problem.

In the terminal...

#Know the swap value    
cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
10
# Access the swap configuration
gksudo leafpad /etc/sysctl.conf

# Increase the swap usage to 30 (default is 60)
vm.swappiness=30

Then, I rebooted. And installed the packages happily without any problems.