R Error: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space

Question

I am trying to connect R to Teradata to pull data directly into R for analysis. However, I am getting the error of,

Error in .jcall(rp, "I", "fetch", stride, block) :
  java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space

I have tried to set up my R options to increase the max heap size of JVM by doing:

options(java.parameters = "-Xmx8g")

I have also tried to initialize java parameters with rJava function .jinit as: .jinit(parameters="-Xmx8g"). But still failed.

The calculated size of the data should be approximately 3G (actually less than 3G).

Answer 1

You need to make sure you're allocating additional memory before loading rJava or any other packages. Wipe the environment first (via rm(list = ls())), restart R/Rstudio if you must, and modify the options at the beginning of your script.

options(java.parameters = "-Xmx8000m")

See for example https://support.snowflake.net/s/article/solution-using-r-the-following-error-is-returned-javalangoutofmemoryerror-gc-overhead-limit-exceeded