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Fast reading from disk

In addition to having intelligent defaults, fread() is super fast! In this exercise, you will use the system.time() function from base R to compare the time it takes to read the batrips.csv file using read.csv() and fread(). All you need to do is pass an expression to system.time(). For example, if you want to calculate how long it takes to import a file called sample.csv, you can use:

system.time(read.csv("sample.csv"))
   user  system elapsed 
  3.495   0.040   3.547

Generally, you want to consider user time when measuring execution time. So in this case, it took 3.495 seconds to import the file sample.csv.

This exercise is part of the course

Data Manipulation with data.table in R

View Course

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Use read.csv() to import batrips
system.time(___("batrips.csv"))
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