[R-SIG-Mac] R GUI very slow under mac OS 10.12.5 (Sierra)

[David Winsemius]

> On May 27, 2017, at 3:44 AM, Martin Batholdy via R-SIG-Mac <r-sig-mac at r-project.org> wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> I just switched to a new 2016 Macbook Pro and noticed that R is very slow when used over the R app. Using R via the terminal is significantly faster.
> Especially, drawing figures in quartz is really slow

Not sure what "drawing a figure" actually means. Can you present code?

> and sometimes the following error message is printed – but this might be unrelated to the speed issue:
> 
> IMKInputSession presentFunctionRowItemTextInputViewWithEndpoint:completionHandler: : [self textInputContext]=0x0 *NO* NSRemoteViewController to client, NSError=Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=4099 "The connection from pid 0 was invalidated from this process." UserInfo={NSDebugDescription=The connection from pid 0 was invalidated from this process.}, com.apple.inputmethod.EmojiFunctionRowItem

This error in Sierra hosted apps has also been reported on other app forums (as well as once before on this mailing list Mon, 19 Dec 2016 by a.beckerman at sheffield.ac.uk but got no response):

https://discuss.atom.io/t/imkinputsession-error/36273

https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/issues/422

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41249603/tkinter-error-in-terminal-possibly-from-my-key-bind


> 
> Is this a known issue related to Sierra and/or the new Macbook Pros? Are there any workarounds or fixes?

I surely don't know about workarounds but this does appear to be specific to Sierra. My MacbookPro is too old to get an update to Sierra. I do wonder if you have an updated (or any) XQuartz and XCode? Generally a complete question will include your versions of all essential system and R packages. 

What does sessionInfo() return?

Try clicking on the system taskbar XQuartz icon and  using `XQuartz/About X11` and copying the version. I get:

XQuartz 2.7.11 (xorg-server 1.18.4)

My XCode version is: Version 8.2.1 (8C1002) but ISTR that Sierra needs a later version.

And you should also probably indicate whether you have used either MacPorts or homebrew.

The other system resource needed in the past was Tcl/Tk although I think that now should get installed and attached by default with any current version of R. The last link of the three above appeared related to the Tk interface which is used by R.app and the tcltk package is part of the base installation, so might be relevant, but this is written at the level of speculation. My other hypothesis is that two different installations of Tcl/Tk might give problems on one machine that were not encountered by others.

-- 
David.

> 
> 
> Thanks for any suggestions!
> 
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David Winsemius
Alameda, CA, USA