You haven't even told us your OS! The simple solution is to use a local copy of R. It is probably the case that few of those 1500 packages are used, and certainly that few are used in each R session: you may also want to install locally any that are heavily used.
We found it advantageous to do this for Windows users of R (where the remote discs are mounted by SMB) quite a while ago, and more recently moved to local installation of R on Linux machines. The issue was not network load but latency for interactive users: although R is heavily used here it is not a major component of our network load and we are rather protecting R users against other applications that are much more demanding. On Mon, 23 Oct 2006, Claudio Lottaz wrote: > Dear all, > > I wonder, if anybody experiences similar problems and if there are any > simple solutions to be suggested. We observe that R causes a lot of > network traffic and thus slows down the performance of the whole > network. When tracing the network traffic on the machine which serves > the R installation via NFS, we see thousands of requests at > initialization of R processes and regular calls, probably to shared > libraries. Is there a way to compile or run R such that it causes less > load on the network? > > Here is some information on our installation: > - We use a single installation of R (version 2.3.1) loaded over NFS > - there are approximately 1500 packages installed using ~8GB of disk > - We use R on a queuing system running up to 50 processes in parallel > > The load on the machine which serves the R installation frequently rises up > to 5 or so although it is a dedicated machine. > Any hints towards measures against network load are highly appreciated. > > Thanks, > Claudio > > > -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
