[R] Question about R performance on UNIX/LINUX with different memory/swap configurations

[jim holtman]

My first criteria is to make sure my application never swaps/pages due
to memory issues -- have enough physical memory so it never happens
and control what else is running on the machine.  Once you start
paging, performance takes a real hit.

On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 2:30 PM, Eberle, Anthony <aeber at allstate.com> wrote:
> Does anyone have any guidance on swap and memory configuration when
> running R v2.15.1 on UNIX/LINUX?  Through some benchmarking across
> multiple hardware (UNIX, LINUX, SPARC, x86, Windows, physical, virtual)
> it "seems" that the smaller memory machines have an advantage.
>
> Typically my organization builds their UNIX servers at a 1:1 physical
> memory:swap configuration.  We plan on running some tests where we set
> have swap at 1:1, 0:1 and 1/2:1 to see if there is any benefit and to
> what degree.
>
> My first assumption is that it would depend on exactly what I am doing
> in R and that fact would need to be taken into account to the
> observations and testing I am doing.  To be clear, I've not approached
> writing any parallized code other than what R might do out of the box.
> However, what testing I have done (using a standard deviation test as
> well as a GBM model) seems to indicate that the Windows desktop (with
> small/slow swap footprint) as well as a Solaris 11 X86 server with swap
> set to half of physical memory seems to perform quicker for these
> scenarios than an physical server with 16CPU's and 48GB memory.
>
> I found a few articles searching the group, but they seem to factor
> around Windows performance considerations (for example, post entitled
> "Re: [R] Memory limit for Windows 64bit build of R" from a few months
> ago.)
>
> I do plan on running through these different configurations on my own to
> test out R, but wondered if the community had any experience with swap &
> memory configuration when running R on UNIX/LINUX configurations.
>
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Anthony
>
>
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>
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-- 
Jim Holtman
Data Munger Guru

What is the problem that you are trying to solve?
Tell me what you want to do, not how you want to do it.