Measuring performance of functions in R
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In R you can use the system.time(function) function to test the time it takes to execute a function. Because I had to do some extended performance testing in R, I wrote a new function based on system.time which gives you the possibility to run multiple samples of a function, to increase the reliability of the measurements. The function is called performance, and takes three arguments: the function you want to test, the number of samples (1 by default), and whether garbage collection should be performed before each function run (yes by default). Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.
For instance:
> performance(complex.function(1,5,”goal”), samples=100)
Average time per run:
—————————–
User System Elapsed
0.338 0.014 0.352
Total time for all runs:
————————
User System Elapsed
33.805 1.369 35.212
I included ‘performance’ in my R basic functions (see also Customizing R: startup script).
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