[Rd] R's IO speed

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Sun, 26 Dec 2004, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 26, 2004 at 08:16:56AM -0500, Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:
>> Brian - I really appreciate your work on this, and the data.  The wise
>> use of read.table that you mentioned should be fine for almost
>> everything I do.  There may be other users who need to read larger
>> datasets for which memory usage is an issue.  They can speak for
>> themselves though.
>
> Thanks as always for the near constant improvements to R.
>
> One possible improvement would be more explicit examples, maybe in a
> \dontrun environment, showing some possible data file format and how
> arguments like colClasses can help increase performance over the naive use
> (that I am still using almost exclusively).

That's the purpose of the R-data manual, which had some and now has more, 
including timings of examples where it matters and where it does not.
Those are showing speeds of well over a million items a second.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595