In this note we share a quick study timing how long it takes to perform some simple data manipulation tasks with R data.frames.

We are interested in the time needed to select a column, alter a column, or select a row. Knowing what is fast and what is slow is critical in planning code, so here we examine some common simple cases. It is often impractical to port large applications between different work-paradigms, so we use porting small tasks as approximate stand-ins for measuring porting whole systems.

We tend to work with medium size data (hundreds of columns and millions of rows in memory), so that is the scale we simulate and study.

Continue reading Timing Working With a Row or a Column from a data.frame