I have R Studio on Windows. It works fine before I connect to the internet through my VPN. After I connect commands start to hang, autocomplete can take forever, and simple operations like 4 + 4 can take one minute or more.
I have a feeling the studio is making connections under the hood. I would like to disable all of these connections no matter what.
I have experienced the same thing - I am assuming your actual work is on a file server and not local. I found the culprit in my case to not be RStudio directly, but rather the RStudio project file. RStudio will create a generally small, hidden folder in the directory named .Rproj.user with some settings. This, living on the file server, caused constant read/writes through my VPN connection.
I unfortunately had to either (a) move projects off the file server into a local copy (not bad since I can use a company GitLab), or (b) delete the .Rproj and .Rproj.user folders from the project directory on the server and use here::here() or something like that as a work around in my workflow.
As another possibility, I have seen installations of R itself done onto a personal server drive instead of locally. This has been done to avoid needing administrator privileges to install. This is not a great idea and can also result in extremely slow performance through a VPN connection. You can check to see where R is installed as well. Sounds like this is not the problem though based on what you described.
Maybe it is something else, but this is what I found last week for me based on a very similar experience.
