Error "cannot allocate vector" of a certain size

[Giulia Ricciardi]

Hi everyone!

I'm processing a centroided "MSProcessedImagingExperiment", with resolution 0.001 mz, and I get a dataset like this: 1001001 feature, 12100 pixel.

Whenever I try to do some preprocessing or to calculate the mean spectrum with summarizeFeatures(), I always get the error "cannot allocate vector of size 4.5 Gb".

How can I overcome this problem? Is it something linked to my computer or is there a way I can make the dataset 'lighter' to be processed more easily?

Thanks in advance!

Giulia