[R] R-0.65.1 Startup

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Fri, 12 Nov 1999, Thomas Lumley wrote:

> On Fri, 12 Nov 1999 partha_bagchi at hgsi.com wrote:
> 
> > Dear R users,
> > I have noticed that my R startup is extremely slow. It takes almost 3
> > minutes  from "double-click" to R prompt. I have been running R-0.64.1 till
> > recently and it took about 30 sec. I still have access to R-0.64.1. When I
> > started it up, it took about 25 sec. Can anyone tell me if this is a bug in
> > R or a problem with my machine?

There is essentially no difference on my machine (366MHz mobile Pentium
IIPE, NT4.0, about 5 secs for each). Do you by any chance have a previous
workspace to restore? (My Win98 266MHz Pentium takes 10-15 secs,
again little change.)

I know of no reason why 0.65.1 should be more than a few percent slower.
I do know that such things are very sensitive to disc speed, and for our
network, a network-mounted file system is fatal.

> I have also noticed a slow startup under Win98 on a reasonably fast
> machine. In fact, the startup is not unreasonably slow -- many large
> programs take this long to start up. The problem is that there isn't much

3 minutes? on an 600MHz PIII? What program is that?

> indication that something is happening, so I have sometimes assumed I only
> clicked once on the icon and tried again, resulting in two or three R
> processes.
> 
> Perhaps Rgui should display a splash screen while it's loading?

Yes, if it took more than 10 seconds, it might well do so. But I find
such things really irritating, so it should be optional.

-- 
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 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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