R help - Oct 2001 - Ultimate Linux Box (was RE: optimal windows R machine)

Well, maybe this is sort of related...

Eric Raymond has written an article for the Linux Journal on how to build an
Ultimate Linux Box.  You can find the whole thing at

http://www2.linuxjournal.com/cgi-bin/frames.pl/articles/style/0014.html

The machine is said to compile the Linux 2.4.9 kernel in 1 min. 50 sec.  I
wonder how long it might take to build R on this beast...

Cheers,
Andy

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Liaw, Andy [mailto:andy_liaw at merck.com]
> Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 9:16 AM
> To: R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: RE: [R] optimal windows R machine
> 
> 
> We did try VMware on one of our Linux boxes (dual P3 866 Xeon with 2GB
> RDRAM).  It was unbearably slow!
> 
> Cheers,
> Andy
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Prof Brian Ripley [mailto:ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk]
> > Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 5:10 AM
> > To: Agustin Lobo
> > Cc: R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> > Subject: Re: [R] optimal windows R machine
> > 
> > On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Agustin Lobo wrote:
> > >
> > > Another alternative is using VMware for switching between
> > > Windows and Linux with no reboot. You can even have both the
> > > dual boot and the VMWare acces to Windows from within Linux.
> > > See http://www.vmware.com/support/ws3/doc/ws30_disks4.html
> > 
> > Have you tried that yourself?  You get a very slow Windows machine.
> > Win4lin is faster, but you only get a Windows 98 emulation.  
> > Everyone I
> > know who has tried those routes has abandoned them, and 
> > either reboots or
> > has a second main box, one for each OS, and switches between them.
> > 
> > I reboot: it takes about a minute.
> > 
> > -- 
> > 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
> > 
> > -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.
> > -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
> > r-help mailing list -- Read 
> > http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
> > Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
> > (in the "body", not the subject !)  To: 
> > r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
> > _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._.
> > _._._._._._._._._
> > 
> 
> -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.
> -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
> r-help mailing list -- Read 
> http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
> Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
> (in the "body", not the subject !)  To: 
> r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
> _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._.
> _._._._._._._._._
> 
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at
stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._

"Liaw, Andy" <andy_liaw at merck.com> writes:
> Well, maybe this is sort of related...
> 
> Eric Raymond has written an article for the Linux Journal on how to build
an
> Ultimate Linux Box.  You can find the whole thing at
> 
> http://www2.linuxjournal.com/cgi-bin/frames.pl/articles/style/0014.html
> 
> The machine is said to compile the Linux 2.4.9 kernel in 1 min. 50 sec.  I
> wonder how long it might take to build R on this beast...
My guess is that it's about twice as fast as this beast (2xPentiumIII,866):

[Current R-devel]
291.64user 13.57system 4:01.62elapsed 126%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (586156major+348522minor)pagefaults 0swaps

The R builds spend quite a lot of time building the documentation,
and are locked to uniprocessor mode for the duration. This is because
it runs as a single perl script that processes all .Rd files in a
package. There's a good reason for that, but splitting things across a
couple of perl runs would speed things up considerably. The compile
part can be done (setting MAKE="make -j5") in 

165.89user 12.78system 1:46.26elapsed 168%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (634972major+360981minor)pagefaults 48swaps

(This machine is still running RedHat 6.2 with it's default dodgy
compiler, so make check doesn't run...)

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at
stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._

All,

A handful of users have reported problems extracting the PDF file from
the ZIP archive (Rex1031.zip). I don't know what caused the problem so I
have recreated the archive and posted it to my website:

        http://www.myatt.demon.co.uk

This morning (19 Oct 2001). I hope that this solves the problem. It may
take some time for the file to migrate to the public facing servers ...
better to wait a day before retrieving the new file (dated 19 Oct 2001).

Thanks to all of you who reported the problems and sorry for any
inconvenience caused.

Best wishes,

Mark


--
Mark Myatt


-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at
stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._