R not responding request to interrupt stop process
Every now and then I have to run a function that takes a lot of time and I need to interrupt the processing before it's complete. To do so, I click on the red sign of "stop" at the top of the console in Rstudio, which quite often returns this message below:
R is not responding to your request to interrupt processing so to stop the current operation you may need to terminate R entirely.
Terminating R will cause your R session to immediately abort. Active computations will be interrupted and unsaved source file changes and workspace objects will be discarded.
Do you want to terminate R now?
The problem is that I click "No" and then Rstudios seems to freeze completely. I would like to know if others face a similar issue and if there is any way to get around this.
Is there a way to stop a process in Rstudio quickly without loosing the objects in the workspace?
Answer
Unfortunately, RStudio is currently not able to interrupt R in a couple situations:
R is executing an external program (e.g. you cannot interrupt
system("sleep 10")),R is executing (for example) a C / C++ library call that doesn't provide R an opportunity to check for interrupts.
In such a case, the only option is to forcefully kill the R process -- hopefully this is something that could change in a future iteration of RStudio.
EDIT: RStudio v1.2 should now better handle interrupts in many of these contexts.