Asynchronous Execution

Some analyses executed by your app will be substantially slower than others. Very slow processes can cause a significant performance degradation because R, and thus your Shiny web server, are single-threaded. This means that when your server is performing a slow process, no other requests can be fulfilled and pages will appear to hang. This is especially problematic for multi-user servers, but even for single-user servers, e.g., when running on your desktop, it is best to let the user continue working while the slow process is executed in another R process.

Deferring a task to another R process and capturing the result later is called asynchronous execution. It is achieved in R using the future and promises packages. The MDI apps framework helps you use these packages to execute tasks asynchronously.

TODO: further documentation pending the integration of these code structure with framework v1.0.

---