[R] How small machines do you run R on?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

One of R's goals has always been to run on minimal hardware, and we say 
for example (src/gnuwin32/CHANGES for rw1070)

  This version of R needs more memory and is slower to start up, because
  it loads more packages by default.  This is only likely to be a
  concern on machines with 16Mb of memory or less than 300MHz 
  processors.  For such machines append R_DEFAULT_PACKAGES=ctest to the
  command line in the shortcut used to run R, when the memory usage will
  be about equal to that of rw1062.

Are people actually using R on machines with less than 32Mb of memory
or where it takes more than 10 seconds to start up, _and_ using a smaller 
set of default packages to alleviate this?  If so, please let me (not the 
list) know.

If we can safely assume 32Mb and a 500MHz processor (where the startup
time for 1.8.1 is around 5 secs, less in R-devel) then we can make some
changes now, including allowing the use of S4 classes in R's basic
statistical functionality.  (There are plans for 2004 that will load R 
objects on first use and so both speed up startup and reduce typical 
memory usage, but not until the second half of the year at the earliest.)

(Until recently I was using a 170MHz 64Mb Sun from 1997 but R no longer 
builds on that machine.)

-- 
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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595