[R] R as a daemon?

[kmself@ix.netcom.com]

on Wed, Jan 03, 2001 at 11:05:46AM +0000, MJ Ray (mjr at stats.mth.uea.ac.uk) wrote:
> kmself at ix.netcom.com writes:
> 
> > I have a GNU/Linux / Unix application in which I'd like to have an R
> > process running in a persistant state, while receiving instructions (and
> > data) from another process, and returning results to this process.
> [...]
> > Has anyone experimented with this or developed a similar solution?
> 
> I intend to work on a similar thing from Perl for release 5 of Rcgi,
> but that's a little way off just yet.  (Release 4 should be out this
> week.)  The benefits of this are obvious: one of the heaviest bits of
> Rcgi is the repeated start-up of R; if maybe not as great as first
> thought: after the first start, most of R will be cached in memory if
> you have a reasonable amount and there's a performance loss from the
> extra housekeeping.
> 
> My first thought is to connect it to a local socket via a process
> doing access control, some stupidity checking (such as not passing
> EOFs on to R) and housekeeping.  Is that sane?

EOFs were my first concern.  Keeping the workspace clean my second.

If the daemon is serving requests from multiple clients, you have to
start thinking about security models.  Otherwise, an option would be to
create a per-client bidirectional client.  I think the "persistant
companion process" model is the way I'd like to fly.  Not really a true
daemon, more a helper app.  Simplifies the problem and should suffice.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>    http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 Evangelist, Zelerate, Inc.                      http://www.zelerate.org
  What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?      There is no K5 cabal
   http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/        http://www.kuro5hin.org
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