04 Advanced SpaDES use
Author: Alex M. Chubaty

# 04 Advanced `SpaDES` use

#### Alex M. Chubaty

#### Eliot J. B. McIntire

#### January 09 2026

# 1 Advanced `SpaDES` use

This vignette is still a work in progress.

## 1.1 Memory monitoring

While `profvis::profvis` is an essential tool for memory monitoring using deep R internals, it is often not sufficient for a discrete event situation. For example, it may be useful to know the peak memory use of an event, as this may be the limiting step for setting up many parallel instances. There is an experimental tool that gets triggered with `options("spades.memoryUseInterval" = xxx)` where `xxx` is a `numeric` in seconds, e.g., `0.2`. If this is set, and `future` and `future.callr` are installed, then whenever a `spades` call is made, the memory use will be assessed at that regular interval. The procedure is: 1. spawn a future session (i.e., a parallel session) that runs `system('ps')` which lists all processes. It only keeps the process that represents the process ID of the main R session; 2. that `ps` call writes to a text file every `getOption('spades.memoryUseInterval')`; 3. if you ran this with a `spades` call, setting `options("spades.memoryUseInterval" = 0.5)` or some other interval (in seconds), it will read that text file into the `simList` at the end (`on.exit`) of the `spades` call (doing this triggers a file deletion of the text file); 4. the object is then in `sim$.memoryUse$obj`.

At that point, the function `memoryUse` can be called on the `simList` and it will do a join on the `sim$.memoryUse$obj` with the `completed(sim)` by time stamp, so each event shows its memory use.

    if (requireNamespace("future", quietly = TRUE) &&
      requireNamespace("future.callr", quietly = TRUE)) {
      options("spades.memoryUseInterval" = 0.5)

      # run your simInit and spades calls here
      # sim <- simInit()
      # sim <- spades(sim)

      memoryUse(sim, max = TRUE) # this should show peak memory use by eventType -- i.e., summarizes if multiple times
      memoryUse(sim, max = FALSE) # this should show peak memory use by event
    }

# 2 References