[R] Running R on Windows 2000 Terminal Services

[Duncan Murdoch]

Barry Rowlingson wrote:
> Gavin Simpson wrote:
> 
>>Dear list,
>>
>>My employer uses a Windows 2000 Terminal Server-based system for its
>>college-wide managed computer service - computers connect directly to
>>the WTS servers for their sessions, using a Citrix ICA client. When I
>>asked them to install R (Windows) on an older version of this service
>>the IT guys installed it but pulled it for performance issues. I am
>>trying to get them to try again but receiving little encouragement from
>>them.
> 
> 
>   'performance issues'? Well, if you have 100 students running MCMC 
> simulations on one Windows 2000 TS box then you may well have 
> 'performance issues'!
> 
>   Perhaps the TS service isn't intended for people to do real computer 
> work on, but is just for Office apps. Then you come along and want your 
> students to do serious number crunching. At that point the MS Word 
> writers experience what we used to call 'lag'.
> 
> 
>>Does anyone on the list have experience of a similar set-up? If you do,
>>I could use that as part of my argument to invest some time in sorting
>>these issues out. I really want to get the Windows version of R
>>installed for teaching because at the moment I subject my students to
>>the rather hostile world of an archaic UNIX session to run R - for them
>>at least.
> 
> 
>   We have a couple of labs that are similar - we use Wyse Thin Client 
> Xterminals which boot Thinstation Linux from a server and then connect 
> to Windows 2003 TS machines using RDP or Ubuntu Linux boxes using XDMCP. 
> We dont use Citrix ICA.
> 
>   'Performance issues' will depend very much on what you are doing. As a 
> quick benchmark, last term we had 24 users in a lab all running Windows 
> and running Matlab, Firefox, that kind of stuff. One dual 2.6GHz Xeon 
> Dell with 4G Ram never went above 60% CPU usage. And we had another 
> three similar Dells sitting idle waiting for installation. Sessions with 
> R run regularly in these labs and we've never had 'performance issues'.

Back in September there was some issue with your setup, but I forget the 
details.  Do you remember?  Is it something we ended up working around, 
or did the 2.2 release fix it?

Duncan
> 
>   So possibly your IT support are stalling. Do they regularly say "Have 
> you tried switching it off and on again?" in response to a support query 
> [1]?
> 
> Barry
> 
> [1] Catchphrase of the tech support guys in comedy series 'The IT Crowd'
> 
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