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rperformancer-markdown

Rmarkdown runs much more slowly than R script after update

I recently updated to the latest versions of R and R Studio on my new M1 Max machine. After update, however, Rmarkdown runs very slow compared to a regular R script. For example, I ran a code on R script which took this long:

user system Elapsed
0.437 0.037 0.490

When I ran the same script on Rmarkdown it took:

user system Elapsed
21.820 0.431 25.243

I have tried unistalling and reinstalling Rmarkdown package, and even R, Rstudio, and Anaconda but nothing is working.

Edit: This is with any code I run. For example,

library(tidyverse)

the following code:

start_time <- Sys.time()

mpg %>% 
  mutate(age = if_else(year > 2000, "New", "Old")) %>% 
  group_by(age) %>% 
  summarize(cyl = mean(cyl, na.rm = TRUE))

Sys.time() - start_time

takes 0.02736592 secs on Rscript and 2.401871 secs on Rmarkdown.

Note: This happens when I have lots of data loaded in R. For this example, I had ~3GB of data loaded in R. When there is no data loaded to memory, performance is similar.

Solution

  • I reinstalled the previous version of RStudio I was using (2022.07.2) and it seems to have solved the issue. It must be an issue with the recent release of Rstudio.