Plotting huge data files in R?

Question

I have a input file that has about 20 million lines. The size of the file is about 1.2 G. Is there anyway I can plot the data in R. Some of the columns have categories, most

Answer 1

plotting directly into a raster file device (calling png() for instance) is a lot faster. I tried plotting rnorm(100000) and on my laptop X11 cairo plot took 2.723 seconds, while png device finished in 2.001 seconds. with 1 million points, the numbers are 27.095 and 19.954 seconds.

I use Fedora Linux and here is the code.

f = function(n){
x = rnorm(n)
y = rnorm(n)
png('test.png')
plot(x, y)
dev.off()}

g = function(n){
x = rnorm(n)
y = rnorm(n)
plot(x, y)}

system.time(f(100000))
system.time(g(100000))