"RPC timed out" followed by complete session freeze after attempting to unfold large sf data.frame object

[dblodgett-usgs]

System details:

Positron and OS details:

Positron Version: 2024.12.0 (user setup) build 96
Code - OSS Version: 1.93.0
Commit: c5ce275
Date: 2024-11-28T02:53:40.010Z
Electron: 30.4.0
Chromium: 124.0.6367.243
Node.js: 20.15.1
V8: 12.4.254.20-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.22631

Interpreter details:

R 4.4.2

Describe the issue:

Working with very large sf data.frame objects, where there is a special list column containing spatial geometry in the variables pane is currently not scaling well.

Steps to reproduce the issue:

Create a too-large data.frame:

nc <- sf::read_sf(system.file("shape/nc.shp", package="sf"))

big_nc <- sf::st_sf(data.table::rbindlist(lapply(1:10000, \(x) nc)))

Attempt to unroll big_nc in the variables pane to see names and types.

Observe the following:

Once I get that error, the session remains unresponsive until I kill the session and restart.

NOTE: If I create a 100k row table, this work but are sluggish -- somewhere between 100k and 1M rows, things go sideways.

Expected or desired behavior:

If an object is too large to function with the variables pane, functionality that may not complete should not be called at all.