[R] efficiency and "forcing" questions

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On 29 Mar 2001, A.J. Rossini wrote:

> >>>>> "db" == david beede <david.beede at mail.doc.gov> writes:
>
>     db> Interestingly, the 10 hours of CPU time was split as follows:
>     db> 6 hours for EMACS.EXE and 4 hours for RTERM.EXE.  Does this
>     db> necessarily mean that if I source()'d my program directly into
>     db> RTERM that I could save a lot of time?  (I just want to note
>     db> here that I have found the EMACS/ESS combinations *extremely*
>     db> helpful for developing my code; it would be nice if it were
>     db> indeed the case that after development one could switch over
>     db> to solo R to do the big jobs.)
>
> I suspect that just using BATCH (it exists under Windows, right?  this
> is pure speculation) would be the right thing to do.   Not having

Yes it does if rw1022sp is installed, or see the rw-FAQ for alternatives.

> Emacs running will save a few Mb, which when you start adding up swap
> time, could be worth it.

I think you lose a lot of time as emacs polls for activity on the output
stream, especially on Win 9x.  So almost all that 6 hours is likely wasted
by polling.

> Of course I agree that development with Emacs/ESS is the way to go,
> but for long-term work (i.e. over 5-10 minutes), you might as well do
> it externally.

Well, of course you are already doing it externally anyway, in that emacs
is just looked up to the stdin and stdout of the rterm process.


If at all possible, we recommend Windows NT/2000/XP for this sort of thing:
they are a much closer approximation to operating systems than Win 9x/Me.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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