[ESS] any way to speed up Emacs\ESS?

[G. Jay Kerns]

Dear ESS-help,

I like Emacs/ESS very much, and have used it on and off for a year
now.  I have tried lots of things, looking for the "best" (whatever
that means).  I keep coming back to Emacs/ESS, partly because I like
its philosophy, and partly for its sheer power.  I am this moment on a
laptop with 32-bit Ubuntu Intrepid;  I am using GNU-Emacs 22.2-0 and
ESS 5.13-11.

Consider the following example code, just for the sake of discussion:

x <- rnorm(100)
y <- rnorm(100)
x + y
exp(x)
length(y)
min(x)
max(y)

If I put this in a frame "scratch.R" and send it to the [*R*] buffer
with Eval region, it takes approx 1.5 seconds on my system before
everything is done and the "Finished evaluation" message appears.  It
takes around the same amount of time if I yank the above text into the
[*R*] buffer and press RET.

On the other hand, I can copy-paste the same code into a terminal and
it finishes instantaneously (well, before my finger leaves Ctrl+v).  I
get similar speed with Sciviews-K, for instance.

Now, the other merits of Emacs/ESS are more than enough to outweigh a
few seconds here and there, but the waiting time seems to be
proportional to the script length, and I am wondering:  is there some
trick, or something I can put in my .emacs (for example), or some
other way to streamline things to make these evaluations faster?

I did some quick searching on Google, the ESS manual, etc, and didn't
see anything immediately relevant.  If it can't be fixed, that's fine,
but if there is something I am missing I would really appreciate some
pointers.

Jay

BTW:  I did see the below thread, and even tried it out, but it didn't
seem to work for me.

https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/ess-help/2009-January/005073.html









-- 

***************************************************
G. Jay Kerns, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Mathematics & Statistics
Youngstown State University
Youngstown, OH 44555-0002 USA
Office: 1035 Cushwa Hall
Phone: (330) 941-3310 Office (voice mail)
-3302 Department
-3170 FAX
E-mail: gkerns at ysu.edu
http://www.cc.ysu.edu/~gjkerns/