[Rd] Re: [R] Running R from CD?

[M. Edward Borasky]

On Sat, 2004-12-04 at 19:47 +0000, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> This is now solved in R-devel: it runs in the slowest scenario below with 
> a startup time of about 2.5secs and no appreciable delay when running.

I've never had any performance issues in R (or any other packages,
really) with Dirk Eddelbuettel's Quantian "live" CDs or DVDs, and they
run the whole OS -- not just the applications -- from a *compressed*
CD/DVD. The key on Linux is, I think, to have plenty of RAM for I/O
buffering in addition to what's required for your R datasets -- my
smallest machine is a 256 MB 933 MHz PIII. I can't comment on the
Windows kernel, though -- I do Linux performance engineering for a
living :).