[R] help wanted using R in a classroom

[Paul Roebuck]

On Tue, 18 Jan 2005, bogdan romocea wrote:

> 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.
>

Mac OS X is certainly capable of running programs on CD/Zip/USB drive.

> -----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
>
> 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 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?

You didn't mention where R is currently installed. What is
the path to the R framework and is that located on the XServe?
If only the student's personal R library directory is involved,
that shouldn't cause these problems.

Did you try creating a disk image (dot-dmg) containing the
R application and have it mount locally on each eMac?

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