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I am running an external program via R that is pretty memory hungry and can take >8 hours to run. I'd like to open up another instance of R to do other tasks but am concerned about crashing the external program and having to restart the process. Should I expect any problems under these circumstances? The external program is widows only and I'm running it on a Bootcamp partition on a MacBook Pro.

N Brouwer
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1 Answers1

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On a proper operating system, both instances will be independent and not interfere with each other. (Unless they compete for the same resources, from that does not seem to be the case from your description.)

This is no different than several users running on server and each running one or two instances...

Dirk Eddelbuettel
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    EXCEPT if you are relying on the results being saved in the .RData file when R exits. If both processes have the same working directory, the .RData of earlier processes will get overwritten. Not normally a problem since long-running processes are usually designed to save results in specific places. – Spacedman Sep 10 '12 at 07:11
  • Well, I guess we all agree that leaving things in the `~/.RData` file is neither best-practices nor robust or transparent. "Just say no". – Dirk Eddelbuettel Sep 10 '12 at 14:20