Rather suddenly yesterday, I ceased to be able to do anything within RMarkdown in RStudio. A check of the Activity Monitor on my MacBook Pro (running macOS Monterey 12.5.1) shows the QtWebEngineProcess taking >100% of my CPU whenever I try to do anything within an R Markdown document. Merely opening an RMarkdown document in RStudio or trying to create a new one causes QtWebEngineProcess to jump to ~130% CPU and the cursor to become non-functional. A search of the R Studio shows that this issue recurs regularly, but the topics seem to be closed at 21 days without resolution. I have also done a lot of Googling and tried the various suggestions with no success.
Even clicking on About RStudio or Preferences freezes everything. After a long delay, I could see that I am running RStudio 2022.07.1 Build 554 on my Mac. (My R version is 4.2.1.). Each time RMarkdown unfreezes and I try to execute a code block, QtWebEngineProcess takes over my CPU and RMarkdown freezes.
Based on suggestions I have read here and elsewhere, I have tried the following fixes, none of which worked:
- I switched the Rendering engine to Software (This seemed to make the issue even worse, so I went back to the default.)
- I moved the file I was last working on to a new location and turned off the "Restore most recently opened project at startup" option thinking that maybe the file I was last working on was triggering the problem. (This didn't help.)
I don't know what to try next. Any suggestions would be appreciated!!