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slow load() in R2.6.0

Mark Bravington 
I'm encountering excruciatingly slow load times for character vectors in
R 2.6.0-- up to 30sec for a 15K file that contains a no-attributes
character vector of length ~1e4 and object size ~0.5MB. In R 2.5.1,
repeated loads of the same set of files are near-instantaneous.

The problem is proving tricky to reproduce consistently from scratch, so
I have attached the 3 files used in the examples below. If I create a
similar-looking object from scratch, then save it and re-load it a few
times, the problem doesn't always occur... at least not in that session.


FWIW I have noticed that the time taken to load seems to be roughly a
power of 2 of the "base slow load time"-- could be a red herring.

The problem seems specific to character vectors-- I noticed it with
entire workspaces and have whittled it down to char vecs only.

The example below is from a brand-new session with only the basic
packages loaded; delays in my real sessions are much longer.


Mark Bravington
CSIRO Mathematical & Information Sciences
Marine Laboratory
Castray Esplanade
Hobart 7001
TAS

ph (+61) 3 6232 5118
fax (+61) 3 6232 5012
mob (+61) 438 315 623



Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or
'help.start()' for an HTML browser interface to help.
Type 'q()' to quit R.
user  system elapsed 
    0.5     0.0     0.5
user  system elapsed 
    3.5     0.0     3.5
user  system elapsed 
   4.13    0.00    4.13
user  system elapsed 
   3.51    0.00    3.52
user  system elapsed 
   4.42    0.00    4.42
user  system elapsed 
  10.44    0.00   10.44
user  system elapsed 
  10.79    0.00   10.80
user  system elapsed 
  10.39    0.00   10.41
user  system elapsed 
  10.67    0.00   10.69
user  system elapsed 
  10.51    0.00   10.52
user  system elapsed 
  14.61    0.00   14.61 



--please do not edit the information below--

Version:
 platform = i386-pc-mingw32
 arch = i386
 os = mingw32
 system = i386, mingw32
 status = 
 major = 2
 minor = 6.0
 year = 2007
 month = 10
 day = 03
 svn rev = 43063
 language = R
 version.string = R version 2.6.0 (2007-10-03)

Windows XP (build 2600) Service Pack 2.0

Locale:
LC_COLLATE=English_Australia.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_Australia.1252;LC_MON
ETARY=English_Australia.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_Australia.1252

Search Path:
Search Path:
 .GlobalEnv, package:stats, package:graphics, package:grDevices,
package:utils, package:datasets, package:methods, Autoloads,
package:base

Thread (2 messages)

Mark Bravington slow load() in R2.6.0 Oct 10 Brian Ripley slow load() in R2.6.0 Oct 10