[R] Faster Printing Alternatives to 'cat'

[jim holtman]

What exactly is the problem you are trying to solve.  What is going to
be done with the data?  Is it going to be read by some other program?
How much physical memory do you have on your machine?  Is there paging
occuring due to the size of the objects?  Have you consider creating a
structure with 10,000 of the variables each time through the loop and
then writing them out?  A lot will depend on how much free memory you
have.  I will also ask one of my favorite questions; "tell me what you
want to do, not how you want to do it".

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 6:12 AM, Gundala Viswanath <gundalav at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I found that printing with 'cat' is very slow.
>
> For example in my machine this snippet
>
> __BEGIN__
>
> # I need to resolve to use this type of loop.
> # because using write(), I need to create a matrix  which
> # consumes so much memory. Note that "foo, bar, qux" object
> # is already very large (>2Gb)
>
> for ( s in 1:length(x) ) {
>    cat(as.character(foo[s]),"\t",bar[s],"\t", qux[s],"\n")
> }
> __END__
>
> for "x" of size ~1.5million, takes more than 10 hours to print.
> On my Linux 1994.MHz AMD processor.
>
> Is there any faster alternatives to "cat" ?
>
>
> - Gundala Viswanath
> Jakarta - Indonesia
>
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>



-- 
Jim Holtman
Cincinnati, OH
+1 513 646 9390

What is the problem that you are trying to solve?