Robert, I'm not exactly an expert, but here's what I think. If you have only 786 MB of RAM on your machine and you are using ~500 of it in a session of R, that could slow things down considerably because your machine is trying to find free blocks of memory that haven't been used yet. I would buy additional RAM.
As for Mike Prager's point about the type of hard drive being important, I'm not sure this is right (someone correct me if I'm misunderstanding). R stores and accesses objects through RAM - they aren't stored and accessed on the hard drive except when reading and writing. So hard drive type probably won't make much difference to speed in R. Matt On 6/20/07, Robert McFadden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Prof Brian Ripley [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > The advantage of dual processors is that you can use the > > machine for several things at once, including multiple R > > jobs. For example, when I am doing package checking I am > > typically checking 4 packages at once on a dual processor > > machine to get continuous high utilization. > > I would like to thank very much everybody taking part in discussion. > Does an answer above suggest that I can open two R console and do > simulations simultaneously? If so, all simulations take more or less 1/2 > times - or much less then doing it in turn? > > During our discussion one mentioned that RAM is important. But in my > computing I do not use up more then 500 MB. I have 786 MB it means > (probably) that I have enough. > Am I right? > > Best, > Rob > > > > > I have little doubt that a Pentium 4 would be much slower > > than the others. > > > > I've just bought an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 primarily to run > > 64-bit Linux, but it also has Vista 64 and XP (32-bit) on it. > > I don't think the differences between the current dual-core > > chips are really enough to worry about: they will all look > > slow in less than a year. > > > > -- > > Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > 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 > > ______________________________________________ > 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 > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > -- Matthew C Keller Postdoctoral Fellow Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics ______________________________________________ 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 and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.