Running functions in R multiple times during benchmarking

Question

I am trying to measure the computation time of a function in R using system.time(). I want to run the function a few hundred times to get an average but I don\'t w

Answer 1

You want to use the rbenchmark package and its function benchmark() which does just about everything for you.

Here is the first example from its help page:

R> example(benchmark)

bnchmrR> # example 1
bnchmrR> # benchmark the allocation of one 10^6-element numeric vector, 
bnchmrR> # replicated 100 times
bnchmrR> benchmark(1:10^6)
    test replications elapsed relative user.self sys.self user.child sys.child
1 1:10^6          100   0.327        1      0.33        0          0         0

For truly expression-level benchmarking, there is also the microbenchmark package.