Reading large files quickly
Thanks guys, good suggestions. To clarify, I'm running on a fast multi-core server with 16 GB RAM under 64 bit CentOS 5 and R 2.8.1. Paging shouldn't be an issue since I'm reading in chunks and not trying to store the whole file in memory at once. Thanks again.
Rob Steele wrote:
I'm finding that readLines() and read.fwf() take nearly two hours to work through a 3.5 GB file, even when reading in large (100 MB) chunks. The unix command wc by contrast processes the same file in three minutes. Is there a faster way to read files in R? Thanks!