[R] RGUI Console settings

Prof Brian Ripley ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Wed Aug 4 08:25:44 CEST 2004


On Wed, 4 Aug 2004, Duncan Mackay wrote:

> Would someone like to comment on the relation between the "buffer bytes"
> and "lines" settings in the console settings? Are they interdependent?

Both are limits, and you need enough of each.

> If so, how? And why allow both to be tweaked? If not, what is the effect
> of changing "lines", but leaving "buffer bytes" the same? 

Changing lines alone allows more (very) short lines.  Changing `buffer
bytes' alone allows longer lines.

> I wanted to be able to see more of some large outputs in my console, as
> I was losing the beginning of the outputs under the default console
> settings. I changed the "lines" setting from 8000 to 16000, but that
> didn't seem to change the no. of lines that would display (checked with
> "for(i in 1:9000) print(i)"). 

What it seems you did not notice is that you got less than 8000 lines, so
that was not the limit you were reaching.

> So then I changed the "buffer bytes"
> setting to 130000 and now the console will display what I want. But
> clearly I don't really understand what is going on here ........

Simple.  To run a large R job you need both enough time and enough memory.
Similarly there are two resources you need to store and display a large
piece of output in Rgui, lines and storage space.  The console needs both
to store the text and pointers to the beginnings of the lines.  Allowing 
both limits to be altered allows you to allocate your resources optimally.

-- 
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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595




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