[R-SIG-Finance] Question on multiple sessions...

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 12 February 2009 at 15:17, Rory Winston wrote:
| This is an interesting scenario. It may be possible to use something like
| networkspaces to act as a distributed broker to contain the results of
| real-time updates and calculations, and access them concurrently from
| another session. I dont see any reason why this would not work.

A few years ago I gave a talk on 'sixteen different ways to Use R' which was
in the context of my Quantian live cdrom/dvd -- all those methods are
available on the live cdrom/dvd.  Networkspaces, Rserve, web solutions,
... are all part of it.  The slides from the talk are still on my
presentations page.

A newer entrant is the bigmemory package -- it permits one to load a
(potentially large object as e.g. a really big matrix with time, price, size,
and a numeric key for the symbol [ as it has to be of class matrix IIRC ] )
and to share that object across multiple R sessions on the same machine.  It
uses shared memory and proper locking mechanisms.

All of these methods skew to Linux.  One should not dismiss this -- the OP
wanted this in a server context, and R is almost perfectly OS-agnostic. In my
mind it makes sense to consider putting R on a real server which opens a
whole new set of possibilities (incl proper 64 bit support for oodles of
ram).  I am sure that it could all be done with Windows too in some way,
shape or form as Turing equivalence still holds. I'd simply argue that it is
easier to get done on Linux.

Hth, Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.