[R] optimal windows R machine

[Taylor, Z Todd]

rossini at blindglobe.net [mailto:rossini at blindglobe.net] wrote:

> >>>>> "AL" == Andy Liaw <Liaw> writes:
> 
>     AL> We did try VMware on one of our Linux boxes (dual P3 866 Xeon
>     AL> with 2GB RDRAM).  It was unbearably slow!
> 
> 
> (and others have responded similarly).
> 
> I think it depends on what you need.  It was fine for me, using MS
> Word and MS Powerpoint, as well as for running (not developing) Java
> GUI-based applications (which have not tended to be that fast on
> Unix, unlike say non-GUI apps).

Maybe I'm more tolerable of "unbearable" slowness, but I also have
found VMware to be more than adequate.  I run an NT4 guest on a
Linux (RH7.1) host and find the speed fine except for really I/O
intensive things (disk or screen).  CPU-bound tasks run at practically
native speed.  You do have to assign adequate memory to the virtual
machine; you don't want Windows swapping to the virtual disk.  So
maybe really large R problems would be painful.

One caveat is that VMware won't work right currently in full-screen
mode on most setups using version 4.* of XFree86.  In windowed mode,
it's a bit more sluggish (screen I/O only; CPU-bound tasks are still
fast).

--Todd
-- 
Why do 'slim chance' and 'fat chance' mean the same thing?
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