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

[Simon Urbanek]

On Apr 20, 2005, at 10:08 AM, Sean Davis wrote:


> On Apr 20, 2005, at 10:40 AM, Samuel E. Kemp wrote:
>
>
>> 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.
>>

If I remember correctly there was an issue in the internals of pbinom  
where the R_ProcessEvents was called quite often during long  
iterations for extreme p and R_ProcessEvents is not a cheap operation  
in the way R GUI implements it (it should be in the archives). This  
was fixed in R 2.1 so please be patient just a few more days until we  
release R 2.1 binaries and R GUI 1.10.


> 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.
>

Swapping issue would be really surprising - JGR uses Java and it  
definitely uses more memory than the Cocoa GUI ;). JGR uses threads,  
so it doesn't have to rely on R_ProcessEvents - that may be the  
reason why it doesn't affect the speed as much as R GUI does.

Cheers,
Simon