Processing time

Split/apply and plyr with a large data set, and measuring the time it takes to execute a function. See ?system.time

winddata <- read.csv("ballarat.csv", header = TRUE, sep = ",")
winddata$Date <- as.POSIXct(winddata$Time, format = "%d/%m/%Y %H:%M", tz = "Australia/Melbourne")

# Create a unique indicator for each day of the 12 years

winddata$day_index <- paste(format(winddata$Date, "%Y"), format(winddata$Date, 
    "%j"), sep = "_")

# then do the usual split-apply thing to loop over each day.

# in the simplest case, just using base-R functions you can do something
# like this: I'm limiting the data to the first 200 samples, as it will take
# a while to calculate them all
dim(winddata)
## [1] 192998      5

# using 'system.time' to measure the elapsed time to execute the function
# limited to 20000 samples!
system.time(my.summary <- sapply(split(winddata[1:20000, ], winddata$day_index[1:20000]), 
    function(x) {
        # put your actual function here that returns your desired results
        return(c(my.mean = mean(x$windspeed), my.sd = sd(x$windspeed)))
    }))
##    user  system elapsed 
##  25.172   0.188  25.463

To make split/apply easier, use “plyr”

library(plyr)
# again, only using the first 20000 samples
# but now using "plyr""
system.time(my.summary <- ddply(winddata[1:20000, ],
                    .(day_index),
                    #.parallel = TRUE, # activate in case you've got a parallel backend installed and configured
                    .progress = "text", # in case it takes longer, a progress bar can be useful
                    function(x) {
                    return(data.frame(my.mean = mean(x$windspeed), 
                                      my.sd   = sd(x$windspeed)))
                    }))
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##    user  system elapsed 
##   1.536   0.004   1.545