Real-Time Collaborative Editing on RStudio Cloud

[EconomiCurtis]

Posit

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.rstudio.com/blog/real-time-collaborative-editing-on-rstudio-cloud

[boyan.kostadinov]

I was very excited to try real-time collaboration on RStudio Cloud. I have the instructor's account and I made two of my students moderators, but it did not work. My writing was disappearing as I was writing and I could see what one of the students was writing but I could not see what the second student was writing. That students also could not see what we were writing. I did not want to give up though and the second time I tried with only one student, it seemed to work fine with one collaborator, but when the second collaborator joined us we could not see his writing. However, when I exited the project and joined it again then I could see what the second collaborator wrote. I know the max is 5 collaborators (as moderators or admins), but it seems to work only for 1 collaborator using the default settings in RStudio Cloud. This is a great feature though and I'll start using it immediately.

[seans]

Hello!

Sorry you are running into problems with collaborative editing there are some known issues around this feature. One of the issues is that it does require additional RAM in order to support multiple users in a project. The type of instability that you are seeing can occur when there is too little RAM in the project.

If you haven't already I might try again while upping the RAM associated with the project. Additionally since you have a paid subscription opening a support request with the url for the project that this is occurring in would let us debug further.

Thanks!

Sean

[boyan.kostadinov]

Thank you so much Sean! Yes, you are right! The issue was related to the RAM, but also the CPU. When I changed the default settings in RStudio Cloud from 1GB RAM to 2 GB RAM, and from 1 CPU to 2 CPU, it worked just fine with two collaborators. It still did not work even with the max RAM possible without increasing the CPU. Basically, the default settings for RAM and CPU work fine for 1 collaborator, but for more than 1 collaborator we need more RAM and CPU. It would be useful to have some guidelines about the optimal RAM and CPU usage for different number of collaborators. The fact that real collaboration in RStudio Cloud does work well with several collaborators, using the appropriate RAM and CPU, is really great news though, and I'll start using the collaboration feature immediately. Thanks again for the prompt response and for resolving this issue for me!