RStudio Running Unbearably Slow/Unresponsive when Connected to Cisco AnyConnect VPN

Question

• R Version: 4.3.2 (2023-10-31)
• RStudio Version: 2023.12.1.0
• Cisco Secure Client - AnyConnect VPN: Revision 6

RStudio extremely slow and at times unresponsive when working on the Cisco AnyConnect VPN. Some days are worse than others. When I am working onsite, disconnected from the ethernet and connected to the VPN, RStudio runs slow but not unbearably so and projects stored on the network drives will still open without too much delay. There is still some delay reading from and writing to the network drives.

When working from home, I and multiple other members on my team have experienced more exaggerated delays when trying to work in RStudio while connected to the VPN. RStudio was crashing any time I tried to open a project that was stored on a network drive on the previous version of RStudio (2023.12.0.0) with an error page that read:

Cannot Connect to R. RStudio can’t establish a connection to R. This usually indicates on of the following:

The R session is taking an unusually long time to start, perhaps because of slow operations in startup scripts or slow network drive access. RStudio is unable to communicate with R over a local network port, possibly because of firewall restrictions or anti-virus software.

Please try the following: If you’ve customized R session creation by creating an R profile (e.g. located at {{-rProfileExtension}} consider temporarily removing it. If you are using a firewall or anti-virus software which guards access to local network ports, add an exclusion for the RStudio and rsession executables. Run RGui, R.app, or R in a terminal to ensure R itself starts up correctly.

Further troubleshooting help can be found at our website…

On the current version of RStudio (2023.12.1.0), RStudio no longer crashes with this error message when I open a project that is stored on a network drive, but it does take an unbearably long time to open. Scripts also take a long time to open and the render button does not even respond when I try to press it when working from home. The only way I can get a document to render is if I check the “render on save” box and then save the file. Even then, it takes at least 5 minutes to render a document that would typically only take 1 minute to render when I am working in office and not connected to the VPN (but rather connected to the local network via ethernet).

Sometimes, we have also noticed a new symbol appearing in the console when RStudio is running especially slow - a green infinity symbol. Sometimes, neither the green infinity symbol nor the stop sign will appear in the console to indicate RStudio is processing code, but eventually the code will run.

I did check to ensure that R itself starts up correctly by running RGui (R version 4.3.2), and there were no issues there. The app started up quickly and correctly.

These posts mentioned similar issues with RStudio (at least one also mentioned Cisco VPN), but no clear resolution:

• R Studio incredibly slow only after I connect to my work VPN?
• https://community.rstudio.com/t/rstudio-slow-response-over-vpn/6225
• https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio/issues/14096

The only workaround I have found that works so far is working outside of a project entirely and opening/working on scripts there. Even then, all processes seem to be noticeably slower (just not as bad as it is when working on a project stored on a network drive).

Updating to the newer version of RStudio (2023.12.1.0) seemed to help a bit, but the issue persists.

I work in a highly confidential field, so unfortunately, I cannot provide direct screenshots or scripts/code to help provide further insight to the issue, but please let me know if there is anything else (not revealing information from my work computer) that I could provide.

We are hoping to gain some insight as to what is causing this issue before going to our IT department because, unfortunately, the response to an unknown issue is often to wipe the computer and try to reinstall everything. If possible, we would like to avoid this scenario by providing more detailed insight into what could be the problem.

This is my first post to StackOverflow, so if the format of this post or anything else is incorrect/un-helpful, please let me know and I can try to make corrections.

Thank you!