[R] naive question

[Vadim Ogranovich]

 R's IO is indeed 20 - 50 times slower than that of equivalent C code no
matter what you do, which has been a pain for some of us. It does
however help read the Import/Export tips as w/o them the ratio gets much
worse. As Gabor G. suggested in another mail, if you use the file
repeatedly you can convert it into internal format: read.table once into
R and save using save()... This is much faster.

In my experience R is not so good at large data sets, where large is
roughly 10% of your RAM.