R Studio becomes exteremely slow after few days again and again

[MarkvD]

Dear Rstudio community,

i'm facing a rather mysterious and annoying problem. For the third time in 10 days now, my RStudio performance has turned into snail pace again.

I'm running the latest versions of R and Rstudio (as of 14-03-2019)

The previous 2 times I resorted to a complete wipe of all R and RStudio files on my hard disk, full re installation etc etc, but once again after a few days, the functioning has become tens if not hundreds of times slower than what it should be.

In particular I am trying to run my R Shiny app offline that I have been developing for the past 3 years.
In those three years I've rarely had any problems, and certainly not like this one.

I am becoming rather desperate as I do not understand why the functioning keeps going back to ultra slow mode.

Rebooting the laptop, reinstalling everything doesn't seem to help, or only for a few days.

Does anyone have any idea what could be the cause, or how to solve this?

I can provide what ever information needed to identify the cause of course.

I am running windows Pro 7
I'm running RStudio desktop and a local version of my shiny app
(but whole Rstudio is slow, not just my app)
Rsession is running around 300.000K on the start, and is super slow from the get-go after complete fresh reboot and start up, nothing else major running on the laptop
Rstudio.exe *32 is at about 220.000K Doesn't seem to be problematic.

compared to yesterday, I haven't changed anything on my laptop, but suddenly the speed of R is unworkable again, and this is the third time it occurs now in 2 weeks.

Sometimes RStudio also throws a "can't connect while checking for updates" on startup, but not always.

Thanks in advance for any help,

Mark v D.

[jdlong]

hey Mark, I don't have an answer but here's a brain dump of things I would check. Others may give you more info.

1. What OS?
2. Are you using any network drives or network resources?
3. is either R or RStudio using a ridiculous amount of CPU or RAM when things get slow?
4. If you're on Windows you can use procmon to track what files are being accessed by your processes. Might be useful for you.

[MarkvD]

I am running windows Pro 7
I'm running RStudio offline (how do I check for network drives sources in this case?)
Rsession is running around 300.000K on the start, and is superslow from the get-go
Rstudio.exe *32 is at about 220.000K Doesn't seem to be problematic.
Sometimes RStudio also throws a "can't connect while checking for updates" on startup, but not always.
I just installed procmon. What should I be looking for?

Thanks so far jdlong!

[jdlong]

well if you're not connected to a network then I guess you are't accidentally installing R packages on a network drive or something like that. That's notoriously slow. But sounds like not your issue.

I agree that 300MB and 220MB are not shockingly big. Mine are a little smaller, but not orders of magnitude:

with procmon I would look for processes that are either 1) sucking up CPU or 2) accessing files on our HD during the time that RStudio is really slow.

Check out this thread. It looks like there might be issues with Windows Defender. Related, are you using Google Drive? That's been known to cause file access contention.

[kevinushey]

See Rstudio Startup time ~40 seconds for another set of things you could try to potentially alleviate the issue.

[jdlong]

That might make a good FAQ Kevin.