[R] R for large data sets

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 15 Jan 2002, wei, xiaoyan wrote:

> As a part of our regular data analysis, I have to read in large data sets
> with six columns and about a million rows. In Splus, this usually take a
> couple of minutes. I just tried R, it seems take forever to use read.table()
> to read in the data frame! It did not help much even though I specified
> colClasses and nrows in read.table().
>
> How is R's ability to analyze large data sets? I used R on solaris 2.6 and I
> used all default compilation flags when building the R package. Will it help
> if I use some compilation flags with higher optimization level?

It will help to use R-patched, since I guess you are using 1.4.0.
Also, look in the list archives, as I answered this more fully earlier
today.

In either S-PLUS or R, scan would be a better choice for such a dataset.

-- 
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 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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