[R] R 2.0.0. startup fast! (was ... slow)

[Thomas Petzoldt]

Hello and many thanks for all who replied!

I was wondering, why R 2.0.0/Windows with the complete CRAN set starts 
so slow from an NT 4.0 Server. Then I run a lot of systematic tests and 
found that only the NT4 server had this behavior but other servers 
(Windows 2003 and Linux/Samba) responded quickly.

Moreover I found, that this was due to a large number of directories in 
R_HOME/library and that there is a performance difference of local vs. 
remote directory listings on windows shares. After finding good keywords 
to describe this problem, it is solved now:

It is not an R problem but a (known) networking issue, see article 
number 177266 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

According to this I created a new DWORD value with name "SizeReqBuf" to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters

and set its value to 14596 (other articles suggest 65535, which requires 
more memory).

After ...

  net stop server
  net start server

... the problem disappeared immediately and now R starts and initializes 
within 3 seconds, that is absolutely acceptable and much faster than 
other, less powerful programs.

Many thanks to the R people for their great software!

Thomas P.