is R creating too many threads on startup

Question

Every invocation of R is creating 63 sub processes

Rscript --vanilla  -e 'Sys.sleep(5)' &  pstree -p $! | grep -c '{R}'
# 63

where pstree looks something like this

R(2562809)─┬─{R}(2562818)                                                                                                                                                     
           ├─{R}(2562819)
           ...
           ├─{R}(2562878)
           ├─{R}(2562879)
           └─{R}(2562880)

is this expected behavior?

This is a 72 core machine with debian 9.3, R 3.4.3, blas 3.7.0, and openmp 2.0.2

dpkg-query -l '*blas*' 'r-base' '*lapack*' '*openmp*'|grep ^ii
ii  libblas-common     3.7.0-2                    amd64        Dependency package for all BLAS implementations
ii  libblas-dev        3.7.0-2                    amd64        Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines 3, static library
ii  libblas3           3.7.0-2                    amd64        Basic Linear Algebra Reference implementations, shared library
ii  liblapack-dev      3.7.0-2                    amd64        Library of linear algebra routines 3 - static version
ii  liblapack3         3.7.0-2                    amd64        Library of linear algebra routines 3 - shared version
ii  libopenblas-base   0.2.19-3                   amd64        Optimized BLAS (linear algebra) library (shared library)
ii  libopenmpi-dev     2.0.2-2                    amd64        high performance message passing library -- header files
ii  libopenmpi2:amd64  2.0.2-2                    amd64        high performance message passing library -- shared library
ii  libopenmpt0:amd64  0.2.7386~beta20.3-3+deb9u2 amd64        module music library based on OpenMPT -- shared library
ii  openmpi-bin        2.0.2-2                    amd64        high performance message passing library -- binaries
ii  openmpi-common     2.0.2-2                    all          high performance message passing library -- common files
ii  r-base             3.4.3-1~stretchcran.0      all          GNU R statistical computation and graphics system

R is using openblas and openmp libraries

 Rscript --vanilla -e 'Sys.sleep(1)' &  lsof -p $!  |egrep -i 'blas|lapack|parallel|omp'
[1] 2574896
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() tracefs file system /sys/kernel/debug/tracing
      Output information may be incomplete.
R       2574896 foranw  mem    REG   0,20          13931603 /usr/lib/libopenblasp-r0.2.19.so (path dev=0,21)
R       2574896 foranw  mem    REG   0,20          13931604 /usr/lib/openblas-base/libblas.so.3 (path dev=0,21)
R       2574896 foranw  mem    REG   0,20          13840156 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgomp.so.1.0.0 (path dev=0,21)

Answer 1

R is (famously) single-core.

I suspects this comes from libopenblas-base which is (also known to be) multi-core.

Contrast this with our rocker container which uses libblas3 -- single-threaded, not optmized:

> system("pstree")
bash───R───sh───pstree
> system("ps -ax")
  PID TTY      STAT   TIME COMMAND
    1 pts/0    Ss     0:00 /bin/bash
  579 pts/0    S+     0:00 /usr/lib/R/bin/exec/R
  583 pts/0    S+     0:00 sh -c ps -ax
  584 pts/0    R+     0:00 ps -ax
> 

As Debian maintainer for R, I take advantage of the fact that we have several BLAS / LAPACK builds. Base can be ok, OpenBLAS often is faster (but be careful when you then launch multiple cores from R via the different mechanisms) and there is also Atlas. What is "best" will always get a fimr "it depends".