> It would be a help to me if David could expand on his knowledge that
> remote .Data files "can slow down S-PLUS on some networks" here or on
> the S-Plus website, which seems not to mention this.
I was avoiding all the gory details (mostly out of personal risk-aversion
since I'm no expert on the subtleties of network performance) but since you
ask...
The problem relates to the rate at which S-PLUS flushes buffered output when
writing objects to disk (this occurs at the lowest level of the object
database code). S-PLUS 6 flushes the output more often than S-PLUS 2000;
for example, the row names of a data frame were essentially written
one-at-a-time instead of in one large chunk. It doesn't make much
difference when .Data is on a local disk, but we discovered after release
(thanks to reports from users) that this slowed things down when writing
across networks without client-side buffering. For S-PLUS 6.1 we've
reverted to the old way of doing things, and early tests indicates that it
speeds up writing large objects to remote disks quite a bit.
# David Smith
--
David M Smith <dsmith@insightful.com>
S-PLUS Product Marketing Manager, Insightful Corp, Seattle WA
Tel: +1 (206) 283 8802 x360
Fax: +1 (206) 283 0347
Insightful Corporation provides analytical solutions leveraging
S-PLUS, StatServer, S-PLUS Analytic Server and consulting services.
See www.insightful.com for details.
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