R help - Oct 2016 - Maybe OT: Forking in R scripts?

Dear all,

I am currently working a research project on social media interaction. 
As a part of this project, mostly for teaching purposes, I should 
develop a R-based approach for real-time visualisation of streamed data 
(from Twitter).

My idea is simple (and working :) ): A Python-script stream Twitter for 
selected keywords/hashtags/users and redirects the output as JSON in a 
text file. My R-script reads the new entries from this text file every 
5-10 minutes, process the input and updates network and other graphical 
presentations.

Thus far everything is working fine. However, I would like to have the 
possibility to work with my data when my script is sleeping. I just 
wonder whether a simple 'mcparallel({ Sys.sleep(300); TRUE})' (from 
'parallel') would solve my problem? Or is there something I have to take
into account when using 'parallel'?

My R environment runs on Linux, so forking should work...

Best regrads and thanks in advance,
Kimmo

--
?bo Akademi University, Finland
Dep. for German studies

I don't know if the parallel approach would work or not, but a
possibly simpler approach would be to use the tclTaskSchedule function
from the tcltk package.  You could use this to schedule your update
code to run on a regular basis, then you have access to the command
line between times that it runs.

You just need to be careful, if you are accessing a data object at the
same time that the update code runs on that same object, then there
could be problems.



On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 12:02 AM, K. Elo <maillists at pp.inet.fi>
wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I am currently working a research project on social media interaction. As a
> part of this project, mostly for teaching purposes, I should develop a
> R-based approach for real-time visualisation of streamed data (from
> Twitter).
>
> My idea is simple (and working :) ): A Python-script stream Twitter for
> selected keywords/hashtags/users and redirects the output as JSON in a text
> file. My R-script reads the new entries from this text file every 5-10
> minutes, process the input and updates network and other graphical
> presentations.
>
> Thus far everything is working fine. However, I would like to have the
> possibility to work with my data when my script is sleeping. I just wonder
> whether a simple 'mcparallel({ Sys.sleep(300); TRUE})' (from
'parallel')
> would solve my problem? Or is there something I have to take into account
> when using 'parallel'?
>
> My R environment runs on Linux, so forking should work...
>
> Best regrads and thanks in advance,
> Kimmo
>
> --
> ?bo Akademi University, Finland
> Dep. for German studies
>
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-- 
Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D.
538280 at gmail.com