HEllo! I am running Slackware Linux 11.0 with kernel test26.s. I have rkward (a frontend for the R statistical package for KDE) installed and currently it is performing a time consuming calculation.
I want to know if there is some way to exit KDE without stopping the calculations performed by rkward? If there is no such an option, I would be thankful to receive some advice on how to optimise the calculation time. I have already reniced the process to -20. Here is the output of top:


COMMAND PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR SWAP CODE DATA S %CPU %MEM TIME+
rkward.bin 26108 marto 0 -20 114m 86m 24m 28m 1084 71m S 92.9 6.9 1048:57
X 2818 root 15 0 176m 41m 3540 134m 1592 38m S 4.3 3.3 18:23.54
konsole 2234 marto 15 0 29804 13m 11m 15m 40 1380 S 1.3 1.1 0:01.00

As you can see the process in question is rkward.bin.

Any suggestions will be appreciated.
Regards,
Martin

If it needs KDE running then it might prove difficult..but if it works all right without KDE or X at all, you could just start it with screen and detach it and log out. Then when you need it, just re-attach and look at the results. Screen is a program you can easily install, read more about it on the net or search here at LQ.

I don't have any experience with rkward, but run number crunching a lot with the processes having 99.9% of the cpu under kde. KDE doesn't seem to use much of the resource unless I'm moving windows around or running other processes that intensively access the display. Set the screensaver to a blank screen and crunch away.

rkward is a gui frontend ... if you kill X, then it will go down as well. Unless you use screen and the CLI version of R, without rkward, then there is no way.

What do you mean by 'how to optimise the calculation time' ? You want it to calculate faster ? It looks like it's using all your CPU time already.

Things you might try:

1) Use the command line R.

2) Compile R and its dependencies from source with optimization flags.

3) Compile your kernel from source with optimization flags.

That's all I can think of.

Increase CPU frequency, decrease memory timings (might be dangerous, if you do not know what you are doing).