R devel - Apr 2013 - Speeding up build-from-source

Hi,
	I've been playing around with the R source code a little; mostly just 
trying to familiarize myself.  I have access to some computers on a 
reservation system; so I've been reserving a computer, downloading and 
compiling R, and going from there.

	I'm finding that R takes a long time to build, though.  (Well, ok, 
maybe 5 minutes -- I'm impatient :-) )  Most of that time, it's sitting 
there byte-compiling some internal package or another, which uses just 
one CPU core so leaves the system mostly idle.

	I'm just curious if anyone has thought about parallelizing that process?

Thanks,
Adam

On 04/26/2013 07:50 AM, Adam Seering wrote:
> Hi,
>      I've been playing around with the R source code a little; mostly
just
> trying to familiarize myself.  I have access to some computers on a
reservation
> system; so I've been reserving a computer, downloading and compiling R,
and
> going from there.
>
>      I'm finding that R takes a long time to build, though.  (Well, ok,
maybe 5
> minutes -- I'm impatient :-) )  Most of that time, it's sitting
there
> byte-compiling some internal package or another, which uses just one CPU
core so
> leaves the system mostly idle.
>
>      I'm just curious if anyone has thought about parallelizing that
process?
Hi Adam -- parallel builds are supported by adding the '-j' flag when
you invoke
make

   make -j

The packages are being built in parallel, in as much as this is possible by 
their dependency structure. Also, you can configure without byte compilation, 
see ~/src/R-devel/configure --help to make this part of the build go more 
quickly. And after an initial build subsets of R, e.g., just the 'main'
source
or a single package like 'stats', can be built with (assuming R's
source, e.g.,
from svn, is in ~/src/R-devel, and you're building R in ~/bin/R-devel) with

   cd ~/bin/R-devel/src/main
   make -j
   cd ~/bin/R-devel/src/library/stats
   make -j

The definitive source for answers to questions like these is

   > RShowDoc("R-admin")

Martin

>
> Thanks,
> Adam
>
> ______________________________________________
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> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel

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