I just found out by trial and error that the suppressing of print statements in RStudio greatly speeds up the R code.
In my case, code that was originally estimated to take around 40 hours to run, just ran in under an hour after I suppressed all the print statements in the for loops.
This is supported by evidence in other forums, for example in StackOverflow: R: Does the use of the print function inside a for loop slow down R?
Basically, if your code prints too much output to the console, it will slow down RStudio and your R code as well. It may be due to all the output clogging up the memory in RStudio. R is known to be “single thread” so it can only use 1 CPU at a time, even if your computer has multiple cores.
Hence, the tips are to:
- Reduce the number of print statements in the code manually.
- Set quiet=TRUE in all scan statements. Basically, the default behavior is that scan() will print a line, saying how many items have been read.
This is especially true with for loops, since the amount of printed output can easily number to the millions, and overwhelm RStudio.
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