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r-lib / pak

A fresh approach to package installation
https://pak.r-lib.org
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Consider changing default number of cores used #675

Closed maxim-h closed 3 months ago

maxim-h commented 3 months ago

Dear pak developers. Thank you for this cool project!

I just want to bring up a little pet peeve I often find with how software handles multi-core utilization.

Spending a lot of time in shared environments makes me a bit wary of tools where utilizing all cores on the machine is the opt-out behavior. I can't even count the number of times that caused issues for either me or my colleagues.

One might argue that defining some global Ncpus value is a good practice in such environment in the first place. But in R I almost never encountered a need to use it (most packages treat parallelization as opt-in) and it's still a rake that many people might step on, especially since this behavior is explained as far as I can tell only on the website and just a bit deeper than the first time user would want to dig.

Would you consider changing the default behavior to NOT run in parallel unless Ncpus is explicitly set?

gaborcsardi commented 3 months ago

Considering that after many years, this is the first request for this, I think leaving it as opt out is the right decision.

All machines are multicore nowadays, and 99.99% of the people are not using supercomputers.

maxim-h commented 3 months ago

I see your point. Just thought I'd bring it up. Feel free to close it if it's not planned.

Considering the lack of requests for many years, I don't know if most people in the ecosystem are quite aware of pak yet. But it feels like something that can be much more ubiquitous in the future, so the "demographic" could shift a bit as well.

P.S.: Love the renv compatibility. It's lack was stopping me from trying pak before. Hope the smaller issues can get ironed out.