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

[Thomas Lumley]

I think the difference in speed is related to the interrupt processing 
calls.  It was most dramatic in the beta (or binomial?) distribution code, 
but that got rewritten to do fewer calls.

Periodic checking for events is necessary, but the R Gui seems to do a lot 
more work when it happens.

 	-thomas


On Wed, 20 Apr 2005, Sean Davis wrote:

>
> On Apr 20, 2005, at 10:40 AM, Samuel E. Kemp wrote:
>
>> 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?
>
> Just a guess, but are you running into memory issues and swapping?  I don't 
> know how much more memory the GUI version uses over the command-line 
> version--I would have thought not that much.
>
>> 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.
>> 
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Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle