This seems to be a topic that appears periodically without resolution.
I just updated my RStudio instance to the latest version, I hadn't updated since about September. I began rerunning a document when, partway through, the IDE froze and top showed QtWebEngineProcess using about 110% of the CPU (It's a 4 CPU system). After reading the other tickets, I decided that it was probably due to a print statement that was dumping a lot of lines to the output - even though in the past the IDE handled it just fine.
So I built a little reprex, and ran it. Up to 100,000 lines of print, it worked okay, no serious issues. For 1,000,000 lines, it showed some of the freezing behavior, and then the IDE went completely white, showing nothing but a frame.
It's dead, Jim.
title: "Test runaway process"
author: "Alan Jackson"
date: "1/20/2020"
output: html_document
library(tidyverse)
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = TRUE)
The problem
I think the problem is associated with too much printing
top
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
19826 ajackson 20 0 4267776 3.033g 76380 S 0.0 9.7 3:58.00 rsession
19858 ajackson 20 0 4171796 760576 88612 R 101.0 2.3 22:43.62 QtWebEngineProc
Iterations <- 1000000
for (i in 1:Iterations){ print (paste("--->",i,"<---"))}
I am running:
OS: ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Memory: 32 Gb
CPU: Intel® Core™ i5-7500 CPU @ 3.40GHz × 4
Graphics: GeForce GTX 1060 3GB/PCIe/SSE2
RStudio Version 1.2.5033