RStudio Server on Microsoft Azure instance

Question

I am currently running R on a Microsoft Azure instance (Ubuntu virtual machine) using RStudio as my IDE, to which I connect simply through my browser. I am trying to run some commands that take quite some time to complete from within RStudio and figured that I could simply close my tab with RStudio open and the process would keep running. However, when I try to reconnect to see how the process is doing, the page keeps loading but I am unable to see RStudio.

I have a few questions regarding running RStudio on a server:

1. First, am I correct in thinking that I can close my tab and keep the process running?
2. Second, is it normal behaviour that I am unable to connect to the server while the process is running?
3. Third, am I going about this the correct way or are there better ways?

Answer 1

1. Yes, you can close your tab and keep it running.
2. RStudio Server waits on updates from the R process to update the UI. This means that if you have a long-running computation, your tab may not fully reload until it's finished. You may also have seen this in the middle of a session: when R is busy, you can have problems saving scripts that are open in the editor pane.
3. Logging out in the middle of a computation should be safe, but be aware that RStudio will save your workspace and shut R down after a period of inactivity. It then reloads everything when you log back in. But this only extends to objects in memory; if you have any files saved in your temp directory, they'll have disappeared when you come back. They're probably still on the disk, but since your new R session has a new temp directory, you'll have to do a manual search for them.