“Out of Memory Error (Java)” when using R and XLCo

Question

I tried to load a ~30MB excel spreadsheet into R using the XLConnect package.

This is what I wrote:

wb <- loadWorkbook("largespreadsheet.xlsx")

And after about 15 seconds, I got the following error:

Error: OutOfMemoryError (Java): GC overhead limit exceeded.

Is this a limitation of the XLConnect package or is there a way to tweak my memory settings to allow for larger files?

I appreciate any solutions/tips/advice.

Answer 1

Follow the advice from their website:

options(java.parameters = "-Xmx1024m")
library(XLConnect)