[R] for loop performance

[Martin Morgan]

On 04/13/2011 02:55 PM, Barth B. Riley wrote:
> Dear list
>
> I am running some simulations in R involving reading in several
> hundred datasets, performing some statistics and outputting those
> statistics to file. I have noticed that it seems that the time it
> takes to process of a dataset (or, say, a set of 100 datasets) seems
> to take longer as the simulation progresses. Has anyone else noticed
> this? I am curious to know if this has to do with how R processes
> code in loops or if it might be due to memory usage issues (e.g.,
> repeatedly reading data into the same matrix).

Hi Barth

The 'it gets slower' symptom is often due to repeatedly 'growing by 1' a 
list or  other data structure, e.g.,

   m = matrix(100000, 100)
   n = 20000
   result = list()
   system.time(for (i in seq_len(n)) result[[i]] = m)

versus 'pre-allocate and fill'

    result = vector("list", n)
    system.time(for (i in seq_len(n)) result[[i]] = m)

The former causes 'result' to be copied on each new assignment, and the 
size of the copy gets larger each time.

>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Barth
>
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