[R] help.search and indexing

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 7 Jan 2008, Dong-hyun Oh wrote:

> Dear expeRt,
>
> I occasionally use help.search() function to find appropriate
> functions in R.
> Whenever committing help.search() after rerunning R, it takes so much
> time to find help (around 2 minutes).
> Is there any way to make it faster in help.search()?
> I think indexing help database is one of the solution, but i don't

It is already done for each package, at installation.

> know how to do.

What version of R?  This is much faster in recent versions, including 
R-devel.  The latter takes only 3 seconds on my system, with 1500 packages 
installed.  It is likely the problem is reading the package indices on 
your system, especially if they are on a non-local or slow file system.
Note that subsequent queries in the session make use of the already-built 
database (if relevant).

> Best,
> Dong-hyun Oh


-- 
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)
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