R help - Oct 2004 - R 2.0.0 (Windows): slow startup over the network

Hello,

I installed R 2.0.0/Windows on our network server (Win NT 4.0) with all 
CRAN packages and observed a quick startup on this machine (3s).

However, when startet from different client machines (e.g. Win NT 4.0 or 
Win XP Pro SP2, Athlon XP 1700, 100 Mbit Network) the R Gui Window 
appears immediately but then it takes 90 seconds to get the startup 
message and the command prompt.

The R base configuration (without additional packages) takes only 4 
seconds on both, the server and the client.

I disabled the virus scanner, read ?Startup, startet R with the 
--vanilla option, with no effect. Does anyone an have idea, what I can 
do next?

Thank you in advance

Thomas Petzoldt

On Wed, 6 Oct 2004, Thomas Petzoldt wrote:
> I installed R 2.0.0/Windows on our network server (Win NT 4.0) with all 
> CRAN packages and observed a quick startup on this machine (3s).
That's actually very slow: decent machine are well under 1s.
> However, when startet from different client machines (e.g. Win NT 4.0 or 
> Win XP Pro SP2, Athlon XP 1700, 100 Mbit Network) the R Gui Window 
> appears immediately but then it takes 90 seconds to get the startup 
> message and the command prompt.
> 
> The R base configuration (without additional packages) takes only 4 
> seconds on both, the server and the client.
So it's slower without the additional packages!
> I disabled the virus scanner, read ?Startup, startet R with the 
> --vanilla option, with no effect. Does anyone an have idea, what I can 
> do next?
Read the NEWS file, which says

	As the lazy-loading databases will be consulted often, R
	will be slower if run from a slow network-mounted disc.

and I have only seen this with Windows network-mounted discs. With our
7-year-old Sun Sparc 1 server running Samba it takes about 25s, and that
is a pretty extreme situation (and that server is about to be retired),
which were are solving by installing R 2.0.0 locally.

Your network looks very slow, and maybe needs checking out.  No one 
checking alpha or beta versions has reported any problems, including you.

I do plan to address this in a future version, and did not do for 2.0.0
precisely because no end-user reported any problem during testing.

-- 
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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

Hello and many thanks for all who replied!

I was wondering, why R 2.0.0/Windows with the complete CRAN set starts 
so slow from an NT 4.0 Server. Then I run a lot of systematic tests and 
found that only the NT4 server had this behavior but other servers 
(Windows 2003 and Linux/Samba) responded quickly.

Moreover I found, that this was due to a large number of directories in 
R_HOME/library and that there is a performance difference of local vs. 
remote directory listings on windows shares. After finding good keywords 
to describe this problem, it is solved now:

It is not an R problem but a (known) networking issue, see article 
number 177266 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

According to this I created a new DWORD value with name "SizeReqBuf"
to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters

and set its value to 14596 (other articles suggest 65535, which requires 
more memory).

After ...

  net stop server
  net start server

... the problem disappeared immediately and now R starts and initializes 
within 3 seconds, that is absolutely acceptable and much faster than 
other, less powerful programs.

Many thanks to the R people for their great software!

Thomas P.