Why Is RStudio so slow to start and to display data frames

RStudio sometimes takes several minutes to start, and sometimes so long that Windows decides it is unresponsive and offers to can it. Why is this? It's a pain.

Also, if you ask to view a data frame it sometimes takes several minutes for even small data frames to appear.

I have tried different ways of closing down the IDE, different ways of starting it and so on, but it is just so slooooow compared to raw R.

Are you saving workspace to rdata? If you have lots of things to load, it makes sense to have it very slow..

As @haozhu233 says r studio may start/run slowly is it is saving a lot state. Here is an article that show how to reset that state which may clean up the issue you are having. Of course you will lose all the state you have built up...

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I have many different RData files for different projects. Even small workspaces take a long time to load.

Thanks, I'll try renaming the desktop state. With many projects, if I have to do this every time I restart RStudio it's going to be a pain. This seems to be a design flaw in the software.

What version of RStudio are you using? Are you working within Windows networked filesystems, or something similar? (Do your projects, or do your R libraries, live on a networked filesystem?)

RStudio Version 1.1.383.

All my R workspaces and scripts live on my C drive, and none are copied to the network. R libraries may be copied to both places, but RStudio is slow to start even when I'm off the network.

Resetting R's desktop state made it start virtually instantaneously, but it will become slower as I use more projects, I expect. The developers should consider changing the desktop state system. What function does all that housekeeping serve?

My machine is an i7 with Win7 Professional and all my drives are solid state, so it is a blindingly fast bit of hardware.

R Studio takes an extremely long time to load, sometimes more than 5
minutes, to the point where I often just can it and use raw R.

My students are having the same experience.

It also takes an enormously long time to display a data frame.

This is going to kill R Studio as a product.

Unfortunately, it's quite difficult to get to the bottom of issues such as this -- not all users are encountering this issue, so it may be some sort of bad interaction between RStudio and your environment, or the way your machine / R is configured.

We did have some reports from Windows users related to slowness when using View(), as discussed here:


You didn't say what version of RStudio you're using, but if you're running into the same issue, it should be resolved in the latest release (v1.1.442).

If you are still having issues, a diagnostic report may be helpful.

I've upgraded to the latest version and all the students will shortly be on that version too, I hope. It's better, but still up to 30 seconds for a startup, which is what the previous version started at before it got progressively worse. Yes, Viewing files is much better, thanks.

Hello EuanGMason and others!
One year later and I am still facing the same issue. I run the same R code which slow down the R-Studio with the „View()“-function in R (not in R-Studio) and noticed that X11 is pop-up. This step makes the machine so much slower as every row is displayed by cell one after another. You can see the computer building the table. Maybe this is the reason why the processing speed is reduced also in R-Studio.