R - Run Source() in Background

R - Run source() in background

You can use system() and Rscript to run your script as an asynchronous background process:

system("Rscript -e 'source(\"your-script.R\")'", wait=FALSE)

At the end of your script, you may save your objects with save.image() in order to load them later, and notify of its completion with cat():

...
save.image("script-output.RData")
cat("Script completed\n\n")

Hope this helps!

Running a R function in background

You can use the future package (I'm the author) for this, e.g.

library("future")
plan(multiprocess)

# non-blocking
res %<-% test()

something_else()

Running jobs in background in R

What would help is to output it to a file when you have computed it and then parse that file everytime you open R. Write yourself a computeMatrix() function or script to produce a file with the matrix stored in a sensible format. Also write yourself a loadMatrix() function or script to read in that file and load the matrix into memory for use, then call or run loadMatrix everytime you start R and want to use the matrix.

In terms of running an R job in the background, you can run an R script from the command line with the syntax "R CMD BATCH scriptName" with scriptName replaced by the name of your script.

How to spawn a long-running parallel process in R that runs an R script?

To use r_bg just wrap your source() call in a function (which should be self-contained) like this:

library(callr)

# create dummy script
writeLines('writeLines(as.character(Sys.time()), "myResult.csv")', 'myRScript.R')

# execute dummy script in background R process
r_bg(function(){source('myRScript.R')})

# read results
read.csv('myResult.csv')

Opening a new instance of R and sourcing a script within that instance

Answering my own question in the event someone else is interested down the road.

After a couple of days of working on this, I think the best way to carry out this workflow is to not limit myself to working just in R. Writing a bash script offers more flexibility and is probably a more direct solution. The following example was suggested to me on another website.

#!/bin/bash

# Run task 1
Rscript Task1.R

# now run the three jobs that use Task1's output
# we can fork these using '&' to run in the background in parallel
Rscript Task2.R &
Rscript Task3.R &
Rscript Task4.R &

# wait until background processes have finished
wait %1 %2 %3

Rscript Task5.R

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