[R] naive question

[rivin@euclid.math.temple.edu]

> At 01:22 PM 6/29/2004, Igor Rivin wrote:
>  >
>  >I did read the Import/Export document. It is true that replacing the
> read.table by read.csv and setting the commentChar="" speeds things up
> some (a factor of two?) -- this is very far from acceptable
> performance,
>  >being some two orders of magnitude worse than SAS (the IO of which is,
> in turn, much worse
>  >than that of the unix utilities (awk, sort, and so on))   . Setting
> colClasses is suggested
>  >(and has been suggested by some in response to my question), but for a
> frame with some 60 columns, this is a major nuisance.
>  >
> Feel free to contribute to the project.   Whining and complaining won't
> get  you anywhere.  SAS *is* faster at I/O.  So what?
>
>
Sigh. Why are you being defensive? If you read my message, you will see
that what it comes down to is: I tried what to me are obvious things (some
of which
only become obvious after getting advice from people on this forum), and I
cannot get the system to perform acceptably. The "whining and complaining"
is actually an attempt to figure out whether I am missing something else
obvious, because I find it hard to believe that I am the first one to face
this [I know I am not, actually, because a gentleman emailed me a response
to the effect that he had to break up his similarly large file into
several pieces to get acceptable performance -- I would say that this
solution is rather hard on the user]; on this list's archive there was a
posting back in '98, asking basically the same question as mine). As for
contributing
to the project, perhaps getting a response of the form "this is slow
because we are trying to achieve this, and that, and the third thing, and
this is the best compromise we seem to have come up with" might be more
encouraging than "So what?"


  Igor