[R] cgi/servlets/httpd in R

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Can I remind people that R will start up very much faster if you don't 
need all the standard packages loaded: in particular, in half the time 
without methods loaded and in 10% of the time if you only need base.
We hope come 2.0.0 to have halved the existing time by using 
load-on-demand of objects.

On Thu, 6 May 2004, David Firth wrote:

> On Thursday, May 6, 2004, at 16:01 Europe/London, Samuelson, Frank* 
> wrote:
> 
> > Here's a related question:  Do any of the mentioned R-web interfaces
> > (Rweb, R-Online, CGIwithR, RSPerl) support reusing the same R process,
> > eliminating the startup overhead?  This would be useful to me as well.
> >
> > Currently I use such a method on my computing cluster:  All 40
> > compute nodes run an R process/compute server that listens at a socket 
> > for
> > any
> > connection and subsequent commands from another computer.
> > When the master process disconnects, the R processes go back to 
> > listening
> > at the socket.  Connecting to the R compute servers this way
> > takes < 2 milliseconds rather than the typical ~2 second R startup 
> > time.
> >
> >
> 
> I only know about CGIwithR, which is very simple and starts a new R for 
> every request.  Startup time on my Mac is around 1.3 seconds; for my 
> own purposes this is absolutely fine, but I can appreciate that it 
> could well be problematic in certain kinds of application (eg where a 
> very large amount of data has to be loaded).


-- 
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