Three Posit Platform Features Worth Knowing About
We recently ran a session on Posit platform updates, the kind of features that don’t always make it onto your radar but can make a real difference once you know they’re there.
This post covers the three highlights: speeding up R package installation with Posit Package Manager, a new way to explore example apps on Connect, and Workbench Jobs for long-running tasks.
R package installs don’t have to take 26 minutes
If you’ve ever kicked off a Tidyverse install and gone to make a coffee (and come back to find it still running), this one’s for you. When installing from source, which is what happens if you point R at a plain CRAN mirror on Linux — R downloads the source tarball and compiles everything from scratch. That takes time. A lot of it. In our test, a clean Tidyverse install on R 4.4 took 26 minutes.
The fix is to point R at a binary-supporting mirror, which is exactly what Posit Package Manager provides. With binaries, that same install dropped to under two minutes, no compilation, no hunting down system dependencies.
If you’re on R 4.5, it gets better. R 4.5 introduced parallel package downloads, which cuts that two-minute install down to around 40 seconds. Throw in parallel CPU usage for installation as well via the Ncpus argument, and you’re looking at 15 seconds for a full Tidyverse install in a clean environment.
There’s also a preview feature to keep an eye on: ManyLinux support in Package Manager. The idea is to bundle more of the system-level dependencies into the package itself, which means less dependency management for sysadmins. Downloads are a bit larger, but the maintenance overhead is lower. If you want a deeper dive into PPM itself, we have a Managing Packages with Posit Package Manager training course that covers this in detail.
The short version: use binaries + R 4.5 + parallel installs. You can go from half an hour to about 15 seconds.
Connect Gallery: example apps without the setup friction
If you’ve used Posit Connect for a while, you might remember the quick-start popup that appeared on first login — a set of example apps you could try out. That’s been replaced by Connect Gallery, which lives in the interface rather than popping up in front of you.
What’s changed isn’t just where it lives. Installing an example app is now one click. Previously you’d follow a set of instructions to get it running; now it just deploys.
Two examples worth highlighting from the gallery:
Usage Metrics — shows you which content on your Connect server is actually being used, filtered by time period and user. It uses a visitor key, so the app shows each viewer only the content they have permission to see. Useful for admins wondering what’s getting traction and what isn’t.
Command Center for Publishers — a dashboard built with Python that reimplements much of the Connect admin interface inside an app. You can rename deployed content, lock it, and manage it through the Connect API. Worth looking at both as a tool and as an example of how to build admin functionality on top of Connect.
If you’re new to Connect or want to get more from it, our Introduction to Posit Workbench training course covers the full Posit environment including how Workbench and Connect work together.
Workbench Jobs: run something long and close your session
This one comes up as a question fairly often: if I start a background job in Posit Workbench and close my session, will it keep running?
The old answer was no. Background jobs were child processes of your session, close the session and the job goes with it.
Workbench Jobs are different. They run independently of your session. You can start a job, close RStudio Pro or VS Code entirely, and the job keeps going. When you open a new session, you can still see it running, check its live output, and monitor resource usage.
This is handy for anything that takes longer than you want to babysit: data processing pipelines, model training runs, file exports. The job has access to your data sources and connections, and you can pick up wherever you left off.
There’s also an auditing option for Workbench Jobs. When enabled, the output gets a cryptographic signature, useful if you need to demonstrate not just that the job ran, but exactly what it produced.
Workbench Jobs vs scheduled content on Connect
A quick note on when to use which. If you need to run something once from inside your current workflow and you want access to local files, data connections, and everything in your working environment, a Workbench Job makes sense. It’s more hands-on.
If you need to schedule something to run repeatedly, share the results with other people, or get an email when it’s done, that’s what Connect is for. The two tools complement each other rather than compete.
If any of this is relevant to your setup, whether you’re looking at speeding up your package environment, making better use of Connect, or running longer jobs in Workbench — get in touch. As a certified Posit Partner, we help teams get the most from their Posit investment from infrastructure setup to long-term managed support.
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