[R-SIG-Mac] R GUI slow on mac?

[Samuel E. Kemp]

Hi,

I have R version 2.0.1 on my PowerBook G4 1.5Ghz, 512RAM, running OS X 
10.3.9. I have noticed that the "official" R GUI runs considerably 
slower than R in the terminal and also JGR. Whilst the differences in 
speed are unimportant for simple parametric stats, it becomes a bit of 
a pig when doing non-parametric stats e.g. neural nets, feature 
selection algorithms.

In all my experiments I have set my CPU speed to "maximum" in system 
preferences. I have also looked at the CPU usage for each 
implementation: on average R in the terminal and JGR manage to get 98% 
of CPU usage, compared to only around 75% for the R GUI.

I guess my questions are:

1) Why the difference in speed when its on the same machine?
2) Is there any way of tweaking R GUI to make it run faster, a la R in 
the terminal?

Any help would be appreciated.

Best regards,

Sam.