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

[Etienne Bellemare Racine]

Hi Davor,

Have you taken a look at the new linux kernel patch to improve 
responsiveness and its workaround [1]. I guess everything is a little 
slower, but more responsive. I don't know if its doable on ubuntu 8.04, 
but I can't see why not.

[1] 
http://www.webupd8.org/2010/11/alternative-to-200-lines-kernel-patch.html

Hope this helps,
Etienne


Le 2010-11-19 16:41, Davor Cubranic a écrit :
> 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
>
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