Question

I am trying to measure the computation time of a function in R using system.time().
I want to run the function a few hundred times to get an average but I don’t want
to copy and paste that many times. Is there an easier way to do that?

Answer 1

The microbenchmark package takes a ,times= option and has the added bonus of being a bit more accurate.

> library(microbenchmark)
> m <- microbenchmark( seq(10)^2, (1:10)^2, times=10000)
> m
Unit: nanoseconds
       expr   min    lq median    uq     max
1  (1:10)^2  2567  3423   3423  4278   41918
2 seq(10)^2 44484 46195  46195 47051 1804147
> plot(m)

And using the not-yet-released autoplot() method for ggplot2:

autoplot(m)