It appears you wouldn't get much improvement at all even if the 2nd CPU were used at 100%. Five R sessions can easily overwhelm one CPU. I think you need (a lot) more CPUs than 2 to solve your problem.
Possible solutions: 1. Install R on each eMac. Since you have 40 of them, you might want to put together a script to do this. 2. Get some boxes that can run Windows. On Windows, you can run R from a CD/zip drive/USB drive. (So you could burn 40 CDs and have everyone run their R session on their box.) As far as I know the same is not true for GNU/Linux and Mac OS. HTH, b. -----Original Message----- From: Sam Parvaneh Sent: Monday, January 17, 2005 6:11 AM To: r-help@stat.math.ethz.ch Subject: [R] help wanted using R in a classroom Hi everyone! I'm using R 2.0.1 for Mac OS X in a classroom with 40 eMacs running Mac OS X version 10.3.6. These Macs are network based, meaning that the students log in to an XServe G4 where their user accounts and home directories are stored. The problem that I'm having each time a group of students (usually 7 to 10) use R is that the whole system get incredibly slow. The response time for opening an application while the students are running R is around 5 minutes. If a student wants to log into the system while others are running R, it can take up to 10 minutes for the student to get logged in. Everything gets very slow that it's almost impossible to work. When I look at the server Graphs, the CPU usage of the first CPU is always 100% when these students are using R. The second CPU is left at 15%. When these students quit R, then everything's is back to normal again. The usage of both CPUs go back down to between 5-10%. Is there anyone out there using R in a university like this? Does anyone have an idea what this might depend one or maybe a solution? I can provide some more information if anyone wants, if you think you can help me. Thanks in advance /Sam [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html