[R] R-0.65.1 Startup

Prof Brian D Ripley ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Sat Nov 13 09:15:25 CET 1999


On Sat, 13 Nov 1999, Ray Brownrigg wrote:

> > Win95 on a 600Mhz Pentium III with 256M RAM (yeah a new machine that I just
> > got).
> > 
> > The R-shortcut setup (which is the same for R-0.64.1) is
> > C:\R\rw0651\bin\Rgui.exe --vsize 25M --nsize 10M
> > 
> Do you realise that --nsize is an item count, not a byte count?  On one
> of our Unix systems, the command:
> R --vsize 25M --nsize 10M
> results in a 229MB process.   That will tax even a 256MB system, since
> Windows takes about 64MB (doesn't it?)

Windows 95 takes about 8Mb, and Partha says rw0641 does work. I did the
calculations last night, thought it was marginal, but we had evidence that
rw0641 would succeed. On my own box, running NT with 192Mb of RAM, I can
allocate about 150Mb in about 5 secs (--vsize 25M, --nsize 6M), but trying
to get --nsize 7M took 2 minutes due to paging.

> So try starting up with somewhat smaller --nsize, I have found --nsize 1M
> suits most needs.

Indeed. If you really need more, R will become slow due to the work in 
garbage collecting so many small units.

The puzzle becomes why rw0641 works. It did use different memory
allocator, and it is possible that one is faster on Win 9x. (As it leaks
badly, we do not use it any more.)

Thomas Lumley mentioned a splash screen. On my systems the console
appears almost instantly. As it is done so early in the code it would be 
impossible to put a splash screen up much earlier. The one thing
that is done before the console is put up is to read the configuration
file.  One common cause of a slow startup is a slow user file system,
as we do have to look for files in the user `home' directory.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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