[R] sample() and memory usage As a part of a simulation, I need to sample from a large vector repeatedly. For some reason sample() builds up the memory usage (> 500 MB for this  example) when used inside a for loop as illustrated here: X <- 1:100000 P <- runif(100000) for(i in 1:500) Xsamp <- sample(X,30000,replace=TRUE,prob=P) Even worse, I am not able to free up memory without quitting R. I quickly run out of memory when trying to perform the simulation. Is  there any way to avoid this to happen? The problem seem to appear only when specifying replace=TRUE and  probability weights for the vector being sampled, and this happens both  on Windows XP and Linux (Ubuntu). Victor ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.