R pyramid plot very slow if fed with larger numbers

Question

I am trying make a pyramid plot with R. The I found a example code in the internet that does what I want. The problem is that I am not working with small numbers as in the examp

Answer 1

Internally, pyramid.plot is trying to do some stuff to finagle the axes accounting for the gap in the middle: if you do debug(pyramid.plot) and step through line-by-line you find where the problem is:

if (is.null(laxlab)) {
            laxlab <- seq(xlim[1] - gap, 0, by = -1)
            axis(1, at = -xlim[1]:-gap, labels = laxlab)
        }

in other words, pyramid.plot is trying to make an axis with ticks every 1 (!) unit. Something like this works OK:

pyramid.plot(x,y,labels=groups,
             main="Performance",gap=5e5,show.values=TRUE,
             laxlab=seq(0,1e7,by=1e6),raxlab=seq(0,1e7,by=1e6))

there are a few other vestiges of the fact that pyramid.plot was designed for demographic plots ... you might write to the package maintainer and ask him to think about generalizing the design of the axes a little bit ...