The past few days I’ve been going through some R code that I wrote last year, when I was preparing a massive simulation-based power study for some tests for multivariate normality that I’ve been working on. My goal was to reduce the time needed to run the simulation. I wasn’t expecting great improvement, since I’ve always believed that the most common R functions are properly vectorized and optimized for speed. Turns out I was wrong. Very wrong.


The first thing that I did was that I replaced all parentheses ( ) by curly brackets { }. I was inspired to do so by this post (and this, via Xi’Ans Og) over at Radford Neal’s blog. As he pointed out, code that uses parentheses is actually slower than the same code with curly brackets:

> system.time( for(i in 1:1000000) { 1*(1+1) } )
   user  system elapsed 
  1.337   0.005   1.349 
> system.time( for(i in 1:1000000) { 1*{1+1} } )
   user  system elapsed 
  1.072   0.003   1.076 

One thing that I found very surprising, and frankly rather disturbing, is that mean(x) takes ten times as long to calculate the mean value of the 50 real numbers in the vector x as the “manual” function sum(x)/50:


> x<-rnorm(50)
> system.time(for(i in 1:100000){mean(x)})
   user  system elapsed 
  1.522   0.000   1.523 
> system.time(for(i in 1:100000){sum(x)/length(x)})
   user  system elapsed 
  0.200   0.000   0.200 
> system.time(for(i in 1:100000){sum(x)/50})
   user  system elapsed 
  0.167   0.000   0.167 
> system.time(for(i in 1:100000){ overn<-rep(1/50,50); x%*%overn })
   user  system elapsed 
  0.678   0.000   0.677 
> overn<-rep(1/50,50); system.time(for(i in 1:100000){ x%*%overn })
   user  system elapsed 
  0.164   0.000   0.164 

I guess that the R development core team have been focusing on making R an easy-to-use high level programming language rather than optimizing all functions, but the poor performance of mean is just embarrassing.

Similarly, the var function can be greatly improved upon. Here are some of the many possibilites:


> x <- rnorm(50)
> system.time( for(i in 1:100000) { var(x) } )
   user  system elapsed 
  4.921   0.000   4.925 
> system.time( for(i in 1:100000) { sum((x-mean(x))^2)/{length(x)-1} } )
   user  system elapsed 
  2.322   0.000   2.325 
> system.time( for(i in 1:100000) { {sum(x*x)-sum(x)*sum(x)/length(x)}/{length(x)-1} } )
   user  system elapsed 
  0.736   0.000   0.737 
> system.time( for(i in 1:100000) { {sum(x*x)-sum(x)*sum(x)/50}/49 } )
   user  system elapsed 
  0.618   0.000   0.618 

> system.time( for(i in 1:100000) { sx<-sum(x); {sum(x*x)-sx*sx/50}/49 } )
   user  system elapsed 
  0.567   0.000   0.568