[R-pkg-devel] "Examples with CPU time > 2.5 times elapsed time" and other NOTEs on CRAN and rhub checks

[D Z]

Hi all,
I submitted my package RITCH (https://github.com/DavZim/RITCH) to CRAN (used to be archived but I wanted to revive it again) but I got a NOTE (Question 1 below). Besides this NOTE from CRAN, I got two other NOTEs from rhub (Q2 and Q3).

Q1) The CRAN NOTE (Debian only, does not surface on Windows or other platforms) reads

*checking examples ... [7s/3s] NOTE
Examples with CPU time > 2.5 times elapsed time
                              user system elapsed ratio
read_functions 3.968  0.092   0.831 4.886
(https://github.com/DavZim/RITCH/blob/master/R/read_functions.R in case you need the source code, the full CRAN report can be found here https://win-builder.r-project.org/incoming_pretest/RITCH_0.1.23_20240110_120457/Debian/00check.log)

The package itself has no parallelism built-in, but Imports data.table. This NOTE does not surface on other platforms (eg using rhub or on my GitHub actions runners). My unit tests already limit data.table to 2 cores using setDTthreads(2), but I would like to keep this line out of the help files for my functions.
Is there anything that I can do or can I ignore the result and argue for an exception using the false positive argument?

Q2) A second question that I have is that on rhub Ubuntu Linux 20.04.1 LTS, R-release, GCC (https://artifacts.r-hub.io/RITCH_0.1.22.tar.gz-d2b925faf6b24497abbfa6ff60e51d34/RITCH.Rcheck/00check.log) I receive the NOTE that my libs/ sub-directory is at 7.7Mb. Can I ignore this or do I need to figure out how to reduce the binary size of the package?

* checking installed package size ... NOTE
  installed size is  8.6Mb
  sub-directories of 1Mb or more:
    libs   7.7Mb

My code uses Rcpp and has some classes and interdependencies between C++ functions, therefore a rewrite to make the binary size smaller might take a lot of work. From looking around online I find that other packages are a lot bigger. Are there any low-hanging fruits that I can use to reduce the size or should I ignore this NOTE?

Q3) And last but not least, on some rhub instances (Fedora and Ubuntu GCC) I receive a NOTE that the package runs its examples too slowly (eg above 5secs). I have already tweaked the example code already that it runs reliably <4 secs on my development laptop

Ubuntu Linux 20.04.1 LTS, R-release, GCC (https://builder.r-hub.io/status/original/RITCH_0.1.22.tar.gz-d2b925faf6b24497abbfa6ff60e51d34)
* checking examples ... [6s/37s] NOTE
Examples with CPU (user + system) or elapsed time > 5s
               user system elapsed
read_functions 2.51  0.028   12.57

and on Fedora Linux, R-devel, clang, gfortran (https://builder.r-hub.io/status/original/RITCH_0.1.22.tar.gz-01bf475551eb4b30a722ea79ce421788)

* checking examples ... [6s/26s] NOTE
Examples with CPU (user + system) or elapsed time > 5s
                user system elapsed
read_functions 1.896  0.018   8.891

As this does not surface on the CRAN checks, I would ignore it for now and concentrate only on the CRAN checks. Is this correct or should I pay more attention to these NOTEs?

Any help/comment is appreciated.

Thank you for your time and best regards,
David

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