How stable are multiple instances of R when one instance is running an external program?

Question

I am running an external program via R that is pretty memory hungry and can take >8 hours to run. I'd like to open up another instance of R to do other tasks but am concerned about crashing the external program and having to restart the process. Should I expect any problems under these circumstances? The external program is widows only and I'm running it on a Bootcamp partition on a MacBook Pro.

Answer 1

On a proper operating system, both instances will be independent and not interfere with each other. (Unless they compete for the same resources, from that does not seem to be the case from your description.)

This is no different than several users running on server and each running one or two instances...