[ESS] R starts slowly in ESS

[Georg Otto]

Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> writes:

>
> First an important "ESS-philosophical" remark:
>
>    Using a saved  .RData  is really very ``ESS-unlike''
>    I'd say that 
>    ``Real ESS-aficionados'' believe that the "Source is Real"
>    and never save workspaces -- I really never ever do.
>    I occasionally do save(..) on specific (lists of) objects, which
>    I load() back when needed, but I never use save.image() nor the
>    equivalent of q('yes')

That is an interesting point of view. Though I often have objects that
take long time to compute. I could save them as specific objects
however. I will give it a thought...

>
> Now to what you really wanted to know;
> I think what happens may be the followoing:
>
>  Your .RData contains a lot of R objects (which I'd call "Junk" ;-).
>  When starting R from the console, these objects are not ``really
>  activated'' (but only "promises" are),
>  whereas ESS does --- for the sake of later object name completion ---
>  "look" at all objects available in search().
>

In my test case I do not have a lot of objects (or do I get you wrong?):

> search()
[1] ".GlobalEnv"        "package:stats"     "package:graphics" 
[4] "package:grDevices" "package:utils"     "package:datasets" 
[7] "package:methods"   "Autoloads"         "package:base"     

> ls(.GlobalEnv)
[1] "a"

Best,

Georg