I figured this was worth a post for the archives anyway since I didn’t find a direct solution to it via Google but eventually managed to cobble together something from various sources. Anyway, I have installed R on a VPS running Ubuntu 14.04 (as an experiment right now), but when attempting to install the dplyr package in particular by the usual method, e.g.,
sudo R
> install.packages('dplyr')
it would crash with the following error message:
g++: internal compiler error: Killed (program cc1plus) Please submit a full bug report, with preprocessed source if appropriate. See <file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-4.8/README.Bugs> for instructions. make: *** [dplyr.o] Error 4 ERROR: compilation failed for package ‘dplyr’
Some Googling later and the cause is apparently not enough memory to compile the package – 1 GB RAM and 256 MB swap on this particular VPS. I found a number of pages suggesting that this can be worked around by instead running the following:
CXXFLAGS="-g -O2 --param ggc-min-expand=0 --param ggc-min-heapsize=8192" sudo su - -c "R -e \"install.packages('dplyr', repos='http://cran.rstudio.com/')\""
…but this still caused the compiler to quit with the same error. In the end I fixed it by temporarily adding a larger swap file to the system, by first creating it and setting the permissions with:
sudo fallocate -l 1G /swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
then telling the system to use it as swap space:
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile
sudo swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority /dev/xvdb partition 262140 258732 -1 /swapfile file 1048572 0 -2
Now, with the same command as before:
CXXFLAGS="-g -O2 --param ggc-min-expand=0 --param ggc-min-heapsize=8192" sudo su - -c "R -e \"install.packages('dplyr', repos='http://cran.rstudio.com/')\""
…and…
* DONE (dplyr)
Sorted.