share {SharedObject}R Documentation

Create an R object in the shared memory

Description

This function will create an object in the shared memory for the function argument x and return a shared object. There is no duplication of the shared object when it is exported to the other processes. All the shared objects will use the data located in the same shared memory space.

Usage

share(x, ...)

Arguments

x

An R object that you want to shared. The supported data types are raw, logical, integer and real. The data structure can be vector, matrix and data.frame. List is not supported but can be created manually.

...

Additional parameters that will be passed to the shared object, see details.

Details

When the function argument x is an atomic object(e.g vector, matrix), the function will create an ALTREP object to replace it. When x is a data frame, each column of x will be replaced by an ALTREP object.

In the R level, the behaviors of an ALTREP object is exactly the same as an atomic object but the data of an ALTREP object is allocated in the shared memory space. Therefore an ALTREP object can be easily exported to the other R processes without dulplicating the data, which reduces the memory usage and the overhead of data transmission.

The behavior of a shared object can be controlled through three parameters: copyOnWrite, sharedSubset and sharedCopy.

copyOnWrite determines Whether a new R object need to be allocated when the shared object is changed. The default value is TRUE, but can be altered by passing an argument copyOnWrite=FALSE to the function.

Please note that the no-copy-on-write feature is not fully supported by R. When copyOnWrite is FALSE, a shared object might not behaves as user expects. Please refer to the example code to see the exceptions.

sharedSubset`` determines whether the subset of a shared object is still a shared object. The default value is TRUE, and can be changed by passing sharedSubset=FALSE' to the function

At the time this documentation is being written, The shared subset feature will cause an unnecessary memory duplication in R studio. Therefore, for the performance consideration, it is better to turn the feature off when using R studio.

sharedCopy determines whether the object is still a shared object after a duplication. If copyOnWrite is FALSE, this feature is off since the duplication cannot be triggered. In current version (R 3.6), an object will be duplicated four times for creating a shared object and lead to a serious performance problem. Therefore, the default value is FALSE, user can alter it by passing sharedCopy=FALSE to the function. alter

Value

A shared object

Examples

## For vector
x = runif(10)
so = share(x)
x
so

## For matrix
x = matrix(runif(10), 2, 5)
so = share(x)
x
so

## For data frame
x = as.data.frame(matrix(runif(10), 2, 5))
so = share(x)
x
so

## export the object
library(parallel)
cl = makeCluster(1)
clusterExport(cl, "so")
## check the exported object in the other process
clusterEvalQ(cl, so)

## close the connection
stopCluster(cl)

## Copy-on-write
## This is the default setting
x = runif(10)
so1 = share(x, copyOnWrite = TRUE)
so2 = so1
so2[1] = 10
## so1 is unchanged since copy-on-write feature is on.
so1
so2

## No-copy-on-write
so1 = share(x, copyOnWrite = FALSE)
so2 = so1
so2[1] = 10
#so1 is changed
so1
so2

## Flaw of no-copy-on-write
## The following code changes the value of so1, highly unexpected! Please use with caution!
-so1
so1
## The reason is that the minus function trys to dulplicate so1 object,
## but the dulplicate function will return so1 itself, so the value in so1 also get changed.


[Package SharedObject version 1.0.0 Index]