[R-sig-hpc] Managing R CPU/memory usage on Linux

[Davor Cubranic]

We have some Linux compute servers that our users occasionally overwhelm 
with their R batch jobs to the point where the machines are completely 
unresponsive and have to be rebooted. This seems to be happening more 
often recently, and got me wondering what other people do to manage the 
CPU/memory resources used by R on their servers.

We 'nice -19' the R process, but that doesn't seem to help. Are there 
any other R options or OS settings that would be useful? Or should I 
consider installing a queuing manager and closing the servers to 
interactive logins? As far as I can tell, out users just run existing R 
packages from CRAN, and there is no parallelization or distributed 
computing going on.

The machines are dual-CPU 64-bit Intels with 4GB of RAM and running 
Ubuntu 8.04. So they won't be making the TOP500 list any time soon, but 
I would have hoped the kernel would be a litter better at squelching 
down CPU and memory hogs.

Thanks,

Davor