[R] CPU usage on Windows

Duncan Murdoch murdoch at stats.uwo.ca
Mon Mar 19 17:59:53 CET 2007


On 3/19/2007 10:17 AM, Jonathan Wang wrote:
> On 3/16/07, Richard M. Heiberger <rmh at temple.edu> wrote:
>> I can't imagine using Windows without Emacs.
>> In particular, the Windows ports of Emacs are very aware
>> of the operating system and usually make the right assumptions.
>>
>> The type of behavior you are noticing can probably be cured by typing C-g in the
>> *R* buffer in emacs.  The most likely cause is that the R process in Emacs
>> is waiting for the plot to finish and is querying the plotting device.
>> Most of that excess CPU usage is from the query loop.  The C-g tells Emacs and R
>> to stop waiting.
>>
>> If C-g doesn't stop the 100% CPU utilization, then it is most likely something
>> about the specific plot you are drawing.  We will need to see a reproducible
>> example to say more.
> 
> The behavior I'm seeing is different from what you've described. It's
> reliably reproducible and occurs whenever a plot window is visible,
> whether using ESS & Rterm or Rterm directly. Something as simple as
> plot(1:10, rnorm(10)) will trigger this behavior.

Could you give the steps to reproduce outside of ESS?  What version, 
what shell, what command line options, etc.?  If I can reproduce it I 
may be able to fix it.  I've just tried a couple of times with no problems.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> The Windows task manager shows that it's the Rterm process that's
> spinning and not emacs. I've previously observed the behavior you
> mention, where ESS gets stuck in a busy loop waiting for the next
> command prompt from Rterm. This is also (obviously) suboptimal, but
> isn't the particular issue I'm having.
> 
> Perhaps it's a graphics driver conflict of some sort?
> 
> Jonathan



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