[R-pkg-devel] checking windows timing?

[Ben Bolker]

   Following up on my questions from yesterday:

   I've been advised to (drastically) reduce the checking time of my 
package on CRAN's Windows platform (currently at 23 min). I've gone 
through and added a lot of conditionals to skip tests on CRAN.  I could 
reduce it farther but I'm starting to encounter seriously diminishing 
returns, e.g.

  * do I condition out some particular test that takes 6 seconds? (e.g., 
a little slow, but not egregious)
  * do I put \dontrun{} around an example that takes 6 seconds [I'm a 
bit confused about this, but as I understand it CRAN checks with 
--run-donttest ? \dontrun{} also sometimes provokes complaints from 
CRAN, because "you should only use \dontrun{} for code that cannot be 
run by users" ...]

   I don't want to spend forever tweaking things, and I don't want to 
comment/condition out all of my tests, but I would really prefer to 
avoid bouncing from CRAN again. I don't know a *reliable* way to test 
whether CRAN-checking on Windows will take <10 mins or not ...

   I don't have a local Windows test platform.

   win-builder gives timings for long-running components, but not for 
the whole run.

   r-hub gives a time for the entire build (19 min in my case) - but 
this includes the time to set up the virtual machine, install all 
packages, etc..

   I can approximately predict that most examples and tests will take 
twice as long on CRAN's windows machines (and four times as long since 
tests, at least, are checked on both i386 and x86_64 architectures).

   Testing is currently taking 6 minutes on my local machine (newish 
Ubuntu 18.04 laptop), so I guess have more work to do, but I wonder if 
anyone has suggestions ...

   cheers
     Ben Bolker