[R] Persistent state of R

[michael watson (IAH-C)]

Hi

I am using R as a back-end to some CGI scripts, written in Perl.  My platform is Suse Linux 8.2, Apache 1.3.7.  So the CGI script takes some form parameters, opens a pipe to an R process, loads up some Bioconductor libraries, executes some R commands and takes the ouput and creates a web page.  It is all very neat and works well.

I am trying to make my cgi scripts quicker and it turns out that the bottle-neck is the loading of the libraries into R - for example loading up marrayPlots into R takes 10-20 seconds, which although not long, is long enough for users to imagine it is not working and start clicking reload....

So I just wondered if anyone had a neat solution whereby I could somehow have the required libraries permanently loaded into R - perhaps I need a persistent R process with the libraries in memory that I can pipe commands to?  Is this possible?

Thanks
Mick