Rstudio Cloud Primer Hanging when 24 students try to do them simultaneously

[jclaisse]

Hello,
I am trying to have 24 students working simultaneously during a stats lab (at Cal Poly Pomona) complete this Primer:
https://rstudio.cloud/learn/primers/1.1

However, it kept hanging up. We have 5 more labs scheduled for this week and would like to have them do that if possible. I saw a previous post where you said you would bump up the capacity for these primers, and poster said that seemed to solve the problem (for a labs of 12 students). Is it possible to bump it up further for our labs of 24? Or should I plan to come up with a different lab activity for this week (and for future semesters)?

Thank you!
Jeremy

[josh]

I am sorry you are having issues with the primer.

I don't currently see a capacity issue, but I see some interesting usage of the parallel package and out of memory errors that indicate unexpected usage in the interactive code inputs. Could you say more about the labs you are running?

[jclaisse]

Hi Josh,
Thank you for your reply.
24 Students in a computer lab are instructed to work through the Data Visualization Basics Primer https://rstudio.cloud/learn/primers/1.1
Students are not logged in to rstudio cloud, just working through the primer on the website. After a 5 or so minutes of working through the Primer, the site hung up for 5-10 students (seemingly) simultaneously. They could hit the reload, and it would restart, but then it would continue to hang up for handful of students. I would guess this was happening they were working on the "A code template" or the "Aesthetic mapping" pages. I'm going to be teaching another lab this afternoon and we'll try it again, so I will try to keep better track of where the issue is occurring (there is another lab being taught right now, although there are fewer students in that section ~12, but it is taught by a different instructor).
Thanks again for you help,
Jeremy

[jclaisse]

Hi again Josh,
I checked with another instructor running these same labs (as described above) yesterday and this morning and this was his response:
Yesterday during my full lab (24 students) we ended up having significant issues. Most of the students were dropped from the server at one point, and a lot of them were having issues getting hung up while attempting the code. I told them to finish it at home. However, during my small lab of 10 students this morning, there were zero issues and all my students finished the tutorial during lab.

[josh]

Thanks for the additional information. Let me try to tweak a few settings on that primer before the next lab.

[josh]

I wanted to follow up and let you know that the learnr team is also helping to investigate.
Definitely update us on how subsequent labs go.

[jclaisse]

After you said you had tweaked the settings things went better in the lab yesterday afternoon and in 2 labs today. All the students in all 3 labs were able to make it through that Primer, although it still hung up (for 5 or 6 students at the same time - seemed like when they were trying to run code), but they hit reload and it went back to where they were and they were able to complete the rest of the primer without an issue. And then in another lab this afternoon almost all of the students initially had issues, but the instructor told them to "Clear browsing data" in Chrome and then try again and he said that did the trick. Thanks for you'll help on this. We'll plan to keep using these primers (with similar numbers of students) every semester moving forward.

[josh]

Thanks for the updated, Jeremy.

Please don't hesitate to reach out if you run into issues in the future. The intent of these primers is for broad and extensive use, so rooting out issues such as those you have experienced is very important to us.