[R] advice on crafting examples for packages

[Prof Brian Ripley]

So an average example takes 30secs?  I don't think your users are going to 
be too happy with that, whereas 100Mb is no problem these days (quite a 
few package tests get there).

I would suggest putting the examples in \dontrun, and putting a selection 
in a test suite or a vignette, with an optional test to run them all.

As a guide, in my tests I allow a maximum of 5 minutes CPU for an R run
(and only one package hits the limits).  Also take a look at

http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/checkTimings.html

where only 5 packages take more than 5 minutes for R CMD check, and the 
average is around a minute.  So you should be aiming well under 5 mins for
R CMD check.

On Sat, 9 Apr 2005, Peter E. Rossi wrote:

> Folks-
>
> I have developed a package which I am planning on posting to CRAN.
>
> I include examples for each of the 40 or so functions in the package.
> However, since the examples are non-trivial and the package is
> using MCMC simulation methods, it takes about 20 minutes to run the complete
> set of examples on a 2.8 Ghz windows PC. The R process reaches a high
> water mark of about 100 MB of memory as well.
>
> I would appreciate some guidance on this.
>
> many thanks!
>
> peter
> ................................
> Peter E. Rossi
> peter.rossi at ChicagoGsb.edu
> WWW: http://ChicagoGsb.edu/fac/peter.rossi
> SSRN: http://ssrn.com/author=22862
> QME: http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/1570-7156
>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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