Question

I just got a gig to help speed up a program in R by improving the efficiency of the algorithms used to calculate data. There are many loops that do different calculations, and I’m wondering which loops end up using the most resources. I want to know how can I count the amount of time it takes for a loop to completely finish. I can use that information to figure out which algorithms to optimize, or even to write a C extension that will handle the calculations.

Answer 1

You can use:

• Sys.time() or system.time()
• The rbenchmark package
• The microbenchmark package
• Or a profiler (e.g. ?RProf)