[R] help wanted using R in a classroom

[Liaw, Andy]

> From: bogdan romocea
> 
> It appears you wouldn't get much improvement at all even if 
> the 2nd CPU
> were used at 100%. Five R sessions can easily overwhelm one CPU. I
> think you need (a lot) more CPUs than 2 to solve your problem.
> 
> Possible solutions:
> 1. Install R on each eMac. Since you have 40 of them, you 
> might want to
> put together a script to do this.
> 2. Get some boxes that can run Windows. On Windows, you can run R from
> a CD/zip drive/USB drive. (So you could burn 40 CDs and have everyone
> run their R session on their box.) As far as I know the same is not
> true for GNU/Linux and Mac OS.

If one can run Linux off a (live) CD, why wouldn't it be possible to do the
same for R?  (Burn a Quantian DVD and you can boot a x86 box from it to run
R.)

If I'm not mistaken, it shouldn't be a problem running R off a USB pen drive
or CD under Linux.  I can give it a shot tonight (if I can find the time).

Andy

 
> HTH,
> b.
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sam Parvaneh
> Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 6:11 AM
> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: [R] help wanted using R in a classroom
> 
> 
> Hi everyone!
> 
> I'm using R 2.0.1 for Mac OS X in a classroom with 40 eMacs 
> running Mac
> OS 
> X version 10.3.6.
> These Macs are network based, meaning that the students log in to an 
> XServe G4 where their user accounts and home directories are stored.
> 
> The problem that I'm having each time a group of students 
> (usually 7 to
> 
> 10) use R is that the whole system get incredibly slow.
> The response time for opening an application  while the students are 
> running R is around 5 minutes.
> If a student wants to log into the system while others are running R,
> it 
> can take up to 10 minutes for the student to get logged in.
> Everything gets very slow that it's almost impossible to work.
> When I look at the server Graphs, the CPU usage of the first CPU is
> always 
> 100% when these students are using R. The second CPU is left at 15%. 
> 
> When these students quit R, then everything's is back to normal again.
> The 
> usage of both CPUs go back down to between 5-10%.
> Is there anyone out there using R in a university like this?
> Does anyone have an idea what this might depend one or maybe a
> solution?
> I can provide some more information if anyone wants, if you think you
> can 
> help me.
> 
> Thanks in advance
> /Sam
> 
> 
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> 
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