Restart R Within Rstudio

Restart R session without interrupting the for loop

I just stumbled across this post as I'm having a similar problem with rm() not clearing memory as expected. Like you, if I kill the script, remove everything using rm(list=ls(all.names=TRUE)) and restart, the script takes longer than it did initially. However, restarting the session using .rs.restartR() then sourcing again works as expected. As you say, there is no way to 'refresh' the session while inside a loop.

My solution was to write a simple bash script which calls my .r file.

Say you have a loop in R that runs from 1 to 3 and you want to restart the session after each iteration. My bash script 'runR.sh' could read as follows:

  #!/bin/bash        

    for i in {1..3}
    do
      echo "Rscript myRcode.r $i" #check call to r script is as expected
      Rscript myRcode.r $i
    done

Then at the top of 'myRcode.r':

args <- commandArgs()
print(args) #list the command line arguments. 

myvar <- as.numeric(args[6])

and remove your for (myvar in...){}, keeping just the contents of the loop.

You'll see from print(args) that your input from your shell script is the 6th element of the array, hence args[6] in the following line when assigning your variable. If you're passing in a string, e.g. a file name, then you don't need as.numeric of course.

Running ./runR.sh will then call your script and hopefully solve your memory problem. The only minor issue is that you have to reload your packages each time, unlike when using .rs.restartR(), and may have to repeat other bits that ordinarily would only be run once.

It works in my case, I would be interested to hear from other more seasoned R/bash users whether there are any issues with this solution...

Restart R session in Rstudio but continue running script

You could break the code into 2 files and write a batch file (.bat) that runs the first file through .rs.restartR() and then the remainder of the code in the next file.

You could also skip the .bat and just schedule both .R scripts to run in Task Scheduler.

Also, please see my comment regarding garbage collection (gc()).

restart the rsession using R code

Depending on what you are actually trying to accomplish, you may simply want something like

  rm(list=ls())

Note: be careful this code actually delete your entire work/variable/data

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