R not responding request to interrupt stop process

Question

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 1

Unfortunately, RStudio is currently not able to interrupt R in a couple situations:

1. R is executing an external program (e.g. you cannot interrupt system("sleep 10")),

2. 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.

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EDIT: RStudio v1.2 should now better handle interrupts in many of these contexts.

Answer 2

This could happen when R is not working within R and is invoking an external library call. The only option is to close the project window. Fortunately, unsaved changes including objects are retained on opening RStudio again.