[R] Persistent state of R

[Joe Conway]

michael watson (IAH-C) wrote:
> 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?

If you are processing data already stored in a database, you could use 
Postgres and PL/R. See:
   http://www.joeconway.com/

Use Postgres 7.4 and preload PL/R for the best performance -- i.e put 
the following line in $PGDATA/postgresql.conf
     preload_libraries = '$libdir/plr:plr_init'

HTH,

Joe