[R-pkg-devel] Re-building vignettes had CPU time 9.2 times elapsed time

[Jeff Newmiller]

You have a really bizarre way of twisting what others are saying, Dirk. I have seen no-one here saying 'limit R to 2 threads' except for you, as a way to paint opposing views to be absurd.

What _is_ being said is that users need to be in control_, but _the default needs to do least harm_ until those users take responsibility for that control. Do not turn the throttle up until the user is prepared for the consequences. Trying to subvert that responsibility into packages by default is going to make more trouble than giving the people using those packages simple examples of how to take that control.

A similar problem happens when users discover .Rprofile and insert all those pesky library statements into it, making their scripts irreproducible. If data.table made a warp10() function that activated this current default performance setting then the user would be clearly at fault for using it in an inappropriate environment like a shared HPC or the CRAN servers. Don't put a brick on the accelerator of a teenager's car before they even figure out where the brakes are.

On August 25, 2023 6:17:04 PM PDT, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd using debian.org> wrote:
>
>On 26 August 2023 at 12:05, Simon Urbanek wrote:
>| In reality it's more people running R on their laptops vs the rest of the world.
>
>My point was that we also have 'single user on really Yuge workstation'. 
>
>Plus we all know that those users are often not sysadmins, and do not have
>our levels of accumulated systems knowledge.
>
>So we should give _more_ power by default, not less.
>
>| [...] they will always be saying blatantly false things like "R is not for large data"
>
>By limiting R (and/or packages) to two threads we will only get more of
>these.  Our collective call.
>
>This whole thread is pretty sad, actually.
>
>Dirk
>

-- 
Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.