[R-pkg-devel] Unusually long execution time for R.utils::gzip on r-devel-windows

[Henrik Bengtsson]

Author of R.utils here. I happen to investigate this too right now,
because of extremely slow win-builder performance of R.rsp checks,
which in turn depends on R.utils.

It's not obvious to me why this happens on win-builder. I've noticed
slower and slower win-builder/cran-incoming checks over the years,
despite the code not changing. Right now, I'm investigating a piece of
code that calls shell("dir") as a fallback to figure out if a file is
a symbol link or not - it could be that that takes a very long time on
win-builder.

So, stay tuned ... I'll report back when I find something out.

/Henrik

On Fri, Feb 16, 2024 at 4:43 PM Stefan Mayer
<stefan.mayer using uni-tuebingen.de> wrote:
>
> Dear list,
>
> I tried to submit an update to my R package imagefluency, but the update does not pass the incoming checks automatically. The problem is that one of the examples takes too long to execute – but only under Windows with the development version of R (R Under development (unstable) (2024-02-15 r85925 ucrt)).
>
> I was able to pin down the problem to using R.utils::gzip(). I created a test package that illustrates the problem: https://github.com/stm/ziptest
> The package has two functions that zip a file given a file path. When using R.utils::gzip() (function `gzipit()` in the test package), I get a NOTE when checking the package using devtools::check_win_devel()
>
> * checking examples ... [55s] NOTE
> Examples with CPU (user + system) or elapsed time > 10s
>        user system elapsed
> gzipit 6.91  47.24   54.84
>
> There is no issue with utils::zip() (function `zipit()` in the test package). Is this somehow a bug in R.utils::gzip(), or is there an issue with the combination of Windows and r-devel?
>
> Best, Stefan
>
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