In this page:

Overview

As you work in RStudio, occasionally you might need to remove an active RStudio session in IDAS. This is useful if, for example, your RStudio session is struggling to load a previous workspace and you get a gray screen. Deleting the active session may allow your RStudio to start from a clean slate and load successfully.

Remove an Active Session in RStudio

1. Log in to IDAS from https://notebooks.hpc.uiowa.edu/.

2. Go to the Jupyter Notebook page for your IDAS session.

a) If you are using the "Interactive Research" instance in IDAS, navigate to the following URL (fill in your HawkID):

https://notebooks.hpc.uiowa.edu/research-interactive/user/HAWKID/tree

b) If you are using a class in IDAS,

First, note that the URL of the IDAS tab in your web browser follows the following format - https://notebooks.hpc.uiowa.edu/CLASS-NUMBER/user/HAWKID/rstudio/
Change the end of the URL from "rstudio" to "tree", so that it looks like the following with your class number and your HawkID:

https://notebooks.hpc.uiowa.edu/CLASS-NUMBER/user/HAWKID/tree/

Then press Enter. You will be redirected to a Jupyter Notebook page.

3. Start a Terminal session in IDAS.

In the upper right corner of the page, click New / Terminal to start a bash session:

4. In Terminal, go to the directory where the active sessions are stored. This directory will change depending on the R version you are using.

a) If you are using R version 3.6:

cd ~/.rstudio/sessions/active

b) If you are using R version 4.0 and later:

cd ~/.local/share/rstudio/sessions/active

5. View the active sessions:

ls -a

The output of this command will show you the active sessions. For example, the output below shows the active session's name is "session-88cf35c4":

grudderham@idas-research-grudderham:~/.rstudio/sessions/active$ ls -a
.  ..  session-88cf35c4

6. Move the active session(s) using the output from the previous step. Note that the name "session-88cf35c4" was in the output of the previous step. In this example, we are moving the active session to a folder called "backup" in the home directory. This will allow us to look back at the active session later if needed.

# create a folder called "backup" in your home directory
mkdir ~/backup

# move the active session to the folder called "backup"
mv session-88cf35c4 ~/backup

7. Restart your IDAS session using the steps here: https://wiki.uiowa.edu/display/hpcdocs/Using+IDAS#UsingIDAS-ShuttingdownanIDASinstance.

8. If this doesn't help, you may need to reset your RStudio's state using the steps here: Resetting RStudio.

Preventing Issues

1. Changing R settings

It may be helpful to change the settings in your RStudio session, so that every time your RStudio session starts, it starts on a clean slate instead of loading previous workspace. Some users never changed this setting and that may be fine. However, issues may occur if you have very large objects in your previous workspace and RStudio struggles to load them.

In RStudio, select Tools -> Global Options -> uncheck the box “Restore .RData into workspace at startup”.

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For more information about different settings in RStudio, please see this support article from RStudio/Posit: https://support.posit.co/hc/en-us/articles/200549016-Customizing-the-RStudio-IDE.

2. Saving your R objects

You may want to save certain R objects, especially if those objects took a long time to create with your code. You can selectively save important R objects with the R commands saveRDS() and readRDS().

For more information about saveRDS() and readRDS(), see the R documentation at https://search.r-project.org/R/refmans/base/html/readRDS.html.
For explanations and examples, also see section “D.4.1 Saving R Files” here: https://rstudio-education.github.io/hopr/dataio.html#r-files

Contact

If you have any questions or comments, please contact research-computing@uiowa.edu.

Removing Active Sessions in RStudio