John Hendy <jw.he...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 10:38 AM, Nick Dokos <nicholas.do...@hp.com> wrote: > > John Hendy <jw.he...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > o run top (or whatever equivalent is available on your OS) and see > > whether the CPU (or one of the CPUs) gets pegged at 100% > utilization > > and stays there. If yes, that's an indication of an infinite loop > > somewhere. > > > > - quit any other instances of emacs/R > > - start `top` in terminal > > - execute block > > - Use '<' '>' to sort back and forth between cpu and ram > > > > Observations > > - R is at 80-100% cpu for about 5sec > > - Then emacs shifts to fairly constant ~100% cpu usage > > - After about a minute, the minibuffer expands to ~1/3 of the window > height and fills with the > csv > > data > > - Finished after ~5min total time > > - So, R took about 5sec, emacs took another 5min to finish > > > > > > So not an infinite loop. That's progress ;-) > > Perhaps emacs is thrashing? If you are on linux, use swapon -s > or (perhaps better) iostat, or (perhaps even better, at least if > you are on the Gnome 2.x desktop[fn:1]), run the system monitor > applet, click Properties, enable all the monitored resources > (cpu, mem, net, swap, load, disk) and watch it while you are > running the test: in particular, check memory and swap. If you > are swapping even a little bit, that's enough to cause severe > performacne problems[fn:2], which can be cured by using less memory > (so stop any memory hogs from running) or by adding memory. > > Oh, and I'm conscious of R using RAM, so I tried to run this stuff without > browsers open, no other R > sessions, etc. Prior to running R and without a browser, I'm typically around > 10-15% RAM utilized... > > I have 4gb, so that should be enough to read this, especially per Chuck's > results! This is also an i7 > work computer. It should fly (and in the ESS session itself, it does). >
Check /var/log/syslog (or thereabouts) to see if the kernel is seeing errors with some blocks on the disk and keeps retrying. Assuming SMART is enabled, run smartctl -a as well and look for problems. Nick