Ultimate Linux Box (was RE: [R] optimal windows R machine)

"Liaw, Andy" <andy_liaw at merck.com> writes:

Well, maybe this is sort of related...

Eric Raymond has written an article for the Linux Journal on how to build an
Ultimate Linux Box.  You can find the whole thing at

http://www2.linuxjournal.com/cgi-bin/frames.pl/articles/style/0014.html

The machine is said to compile the Linux 2.4.9 kernel in 1 min. 50 sec.  I
wonder how long it might take to build R on this beast...

My guess is that it's about twice as fast as this beast (2xPentiumIII,866):

[Current R-devel]
291.64user 13.57system 4:01.62elapsed 126%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (586156major+348522minor)pagefaults 0swaps

The R builds spend quite a lot of time building the documentation,
and are locked to uniprocessor mode for the duration. This is because
it runs as a single perl script that processes all .Rd files in a
package. There's a good reason for that, but splitting things across a
couple of perl runs would speed things up considerably. The compile
part can be done (setting MAKE="make -j5") in 

165.89user 12.78system 1:46.26elapsed 168%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (634972major+360981minor)pagefaults 48swaps

(This machine is still running RedHat 6.2 with it's default dodgy
compiler, so make check doesn't run...)

O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
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