[ESS] any way to speed up Emacs\ESS?

[Charles C. Berry]

On Sun, 15 Feb 2009, G. Jay Kerns wrote:

> Dear ESS-help,
>
> I like Emacs/ESS very much, and have used it on and off for a year
> now.  I have tried lots of things, looking for the "best" (whatever
> that means).  I keep coming back to Emacs/ESS, partly because I like
> its philosophy, and partly for its sheer power.  I am this moment on a
> laptop with 32-bit Ubuntu Intrepid;  I am using GNU-Emacs 22.2-0 and
> ESS 5.13-11.
>
> Consider the following example code, just for the sake of discussion:
>
> x <- rnorm(100)
> y <- rnorm(100)
> x + y
> exp(x)
> length(y)
> min(x)
> max(y)
>
> If I put this in a frame "scratch.R" and send it to the [*R*] buffer
> with Eval region, it takes approx 1.5 seconds on my system before
> everything is done and the "Finished evaluation" message appears.  It
> takes around the same amount of time if I yank the above text into the
> [*R*] buffer and press RET.
>
> On the other hand, I can copy-paste the same code into a terminal and
> it finishes instantaneously (well, before my finger leaves Ctrl+v).  I
> get similar speed with Sciviews-K, for instance.
>
> Now, the other merits of Emacs/ESS are more than enough to outweigh a
> few seconds here and there, but the waiting time seems to be
> proportional to the script length, and I am wondering:  is there some
> trick, or something I can put in my .emacs (for example), or some
> other way to streamline things to make these evaluations faster?

Does this help?

C-h v ess-eval-region RET

 	ess-eval-region is an interactive Lisp function in `ess-inf.el'.
 	(ess-eval-region START END TOGGLE &optional MESSAGE)

 	Send the current region to the inferior ESS process.
 	With prefix argument toggle the meaning of `ess-eval-visibly-p';
 	this does not apply when using the S-plus GUI, see
 	`ess-eval-region-ddeclient'.

'Nother words try selecting a region, then sending

 	C-u C-c C-r

(assuming standard bindings)

and see what you get.

On my Windows XP PC, selecting all of a *.R file and doing that is ever so 
slightly longer than source("that.file.R") and about 70 times faster than 
plain old C-c C-r.

It does echo some prompts (and this is version 5.3.8 in case this behavior 
is different now) , but if you can live with that, this might do.

HTH,

Chuck


>
> I did some quick searching on Google, the ESS manual, etc, and didn't
> see anything immediately relevant.  If it can't be fixed, that's fine,
> but if there is something I am missing I would really appreciate some
> pointers.
>
> Jay
>
> BTW:  I did see the below thread, and even tried it out, but it didn't
> seem to work for me.
>
> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/ess-help/2009-January/005073.html
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -- 
>
> ***************************************************
> G. Jay Kerns, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor
> Department of Mathematics & Statistics
> Youngstown State University
> Youngstown, OH 44555-0002 USA
> Office: 1035 Cushwa Hall
> Phone: (330) 941-3310 Office (voice mail)
> -3302 Department
> -3170 FAX
> E-mail: gkerns at ysu.edu
> http://www.cc.ysu.edu/~gjkerns/
>
> ______________________________________________
> ESS-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/ess-help
>

Charles C. Berry                            (858) 534-2098
                                             Dept of Family/Preventive Medicine
E mailto:cberry at tajo.ucsd.edu	            UC San Diego
http://famprevmed.ucsd.edu/faculty/cberry/  La Jolla, San Diego 92093-0901