Disable watch dog

[JosiahParry]

I was looking at the processes taking up memory on my linux vm which I use to serve a few shiny apps using renv. I noticed that each one has an accompanied renv watch dog process. I suspect the watchdog is used to watch for changes to the package environment.

Is it possible to 1) document what the watchdog processes do and 2) disable them?

For 2) I think this can be accomplished by setting RENV_WATCHDOG_ENABLED=false, is that right?

[kevinushey]

The watchdog is mainly used to ensure that renv doesn't leave around stale lockfiles, in the case that the R session crashes unexpectedly (e.g. due to a segfault). It's mostly an internal detail that should be otherwise invisible to the user, so I haven't documented it yet.

renv uses locks to prevent concurrent access to global shared state (e.g. the sandbox; cache; available packages index).

Indeed, setting RENV_WATCHDOG_ENABLED = FALSE is the right way to disable it.

[gentleboil]

Improbability drive did it's thing and brought me here..
I was also looking at processes on my VM and see a bunch of watchdogs that are lurking. I think because of R sessions that died or were killed.
Am I right that the issue it is solving is a termination during the update of the lockfile? If so, I think I could do without them.

[kevinushey]

It's not used when updating the lockfile, it's used when doing some other tasks like generating the sandbox library, updating the global package cache, and updating an index of available packages.

That said, you can still probably disable it safely, if you're not using multiple renv-using processes concurrently, or if those processes aren't trying to all install packages at the same time.

[warnes]

I'm using renv with parallel apply functions, and am getting two processes created for each parallel worker, eating up a lot of resources.