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Excessive network load
2 messages · Claudio Lottaz, Brian Ripley
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, 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