library load time is very long

[nsheff]

The library function call is very slow. Here are some benchmarks:

Rscript -e "microbenchmark::microbenchmark(library(devtools), times=1, unit='seconds')"
Unit: seconds
              expr       min        lq      mean    median        uq       max
 library(devtools) 0.7143343 0.7143343 0.7143343 0.7143343 0.7143343 0.7143343
 neval
     1

Rscript -e "microbenchmark::microbenchmark(library(dplyr), times=1, unit='seconds')"
Unit: seconds
           expr       min        lq      mean    median        uq       max
 library(dplyr) 0.3258483 0.3258483 0.3258483 0.3258483 0.3258483 0.3258483
 neval
     1


databio/lab|~$ Rscript -e "microbenchmark::microbenchmark(library(bedbaser), times=1, unit='seconds')"
Unit: seconds
              expr      min       lq     mean   median       uq      max neval
 library(bedbaser) 8.686374 8.686374 8.686374 8.686374 8.686374 8.686374     1


databio/lab|~$ Rscript -e "microbenchmark::microbenchmark(library(LOLA), times=1, unit='seconds')"
Unit: seconds
          expr      min       lq     mean   median       uq      max neval
 library(LOLA) 2.352586 2.352586 2.352586 2.352586 2.352586 2.352586     1

devtools: 0.71 seconds
dplyr: 0.33 seconds
bedbaser: 8.7 seconds
LOLA: 2.4 seconds

For a package that is just a simple API interface, does this seem longer than should be necessary to load a package?

[jwokaty]

This seemed to be due to the way I had been loading functions, especially rtracklayer. This is what I get with 0.99.11.

~/R-devel/bin/Rscript -e "microbenchmark::microbenchmark(library(bedbaser), times=1, unit='seconds')"                                                         
Unit: seconds
              expr      min       lq     mean   median       uq      max neval
 library(bedbaser) 0.405445 0.405445 0.405445 0.405445 0.405445 0.405445     1

[nsheff]

That looks much better!

Just out of curiosity -- what exactly did you need to do differently? So I can make sure I'm doing it right in my other packages...

[jwokaty]

I was using @importFrom package function in all my functions, which I changed to package::function within my functions. The previous way seemed to create a lot of initial overhead, especially with rtracklayer, which has a lot of dependencies.