Difference between sessions, R processes and connections.

[vinayprakash808]

Hi all,

Though I’m working on R for the last couple of years, I am unaware of these concepts. Can anyone help me understand these.

Difference between sessions, R processes and connections.

[pieterjanvc]

Hi,

I'm no expert on this either, but here is how I see this:

Every time you start R to tinker with code, it starts an R session. This session normally has 1 R process attached to it, given R is a single threaded language. So in most cases the session and the process are similar. I think the session is referring to everything that runs on top of the R process like the interface in which you are editing your code (e.g. RStudio)

There are a few cases where I feel there is a clearer distinction. First, when you run things in parallel (using any of the packages that implement this), the session will have multiple R processes attached to it, each running a part of the code in parallel. So they all belong to 1 session but are running different things. The second, opposite example is where you run an R script from a command line without actually opening the R or RStudio interface. In this case, you are just running an R process, but there is no interface active.

Finally, connections / sessions is more a thing I think about when working with Shiny. When someone connects to your app, it starts a new session. Multiple sessions can be attached to a single R process (again since R is single threaded) unless you have something like Shiny server where multiple processes can be started to handle more traffic from various sessions.

I hope this might help you a bit, but again I'm not sure I got all the details correct, so maybe someone else can correct me or add more.

PJ

[vinayprakash808]

Thanks for the response.