I suspect that what has happened is that memory, CPU speed, and I/O speed have evolved at different rates, so what used to be acceptable code in read.table() (in both R and S-plus) is now showing its limitations and has reached the point where it can take half an hour to read in, on a readily-available computer, the largest data table that can be comfortably handled. I'm speculating, but 10 years ago, on a readily available computer, did it take half an hour to read in the largest data table that could be comfortably handled in S-plus or R? People who encounter this now are surprised and disappointed, and IMHO, somewhat justifiably so. The fact that R is an open source volunteer project suggests that the time is ripe for one of those disappointed people to fix the matter and contribute the function read.table.fast()!
-- Tony Plate
At Wednesday 10:08 AM 6/30/2004, Igor Rivin wrote:
Thank you! It's interesting about S-Plus, since they apparently try to support
work with much larger data sets by writing everything out to disk (thus getting
around the, eg, address space limitations, I guess), so it is a little surprising
that they did not tweak the I/O more...
Thanks again,
Igor
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