In fact an attentive user reported the same type of (slow due to deparse) problem in may tryCatchLog package recently when using a large sparse matrix
https://github.com/aryoda/tryCatchLog/issues/68 and I have fixed it by explicitly using the nlines arg of deparse() instead of using as.character() which implicitly calls deparse() for a call stack. Looking for a fix I think I may have found inconsistent deparse default arguments in base R between as.character() and deparse(): A direct deparse call in R uses control = c("keepNA", "keepInteger", "niceNames", "showAttributes") as default (see ?.deparseOpts for details). The as.character() implementation in the C code of base R calls the internal deparse C function with another default for .deparseOpts: The SIMPLEDEPARSE C constant which corresponds to control = NULL. https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/54f94f0433c487fe55553b0df9bae477c9babdd1/src/main/deparse.c#L345 This is clearly no bug but maybe the as.character() implementation should use the default args of deparse() for consistency (just a proposal!)... BTW: You can find my analysis result with the call path and links to the R source code in the github issue: https://github.com/aryoda/tryCatchLog/issues/68#issuecomment-930593002 On Thu, 2021-09-16 at 18:04 +0200, Martin Maechler wrote: > > > > > > Martin Maechler > > > > > > on Thu, 16 Sep 2021 17:48:41 +0200 writes: > > > > > > Alexander Kaever > > > > > > on Thu, 16 Sep 2021 14:00:03 +0000 writes: > > >> Hi, > >> It seems like a try(do.call(f, args)) can be very slow on error > depending on the args size. This is related to a complete deparse of the call > using deparse(call)[1L] within the try function. How about replacing > deparse(call)[1L] by deparse(call, nlines = 1)? > > >> Best, > >> Alex > > > an *excellent* idea! > > > I have checked that the resulting try() object continues to contain the > > long large call; indeed that is not the problem, but the > > deparse()ing *is* as you say above. > > > {The experts typically use tryCatch() directly, instead of try() , > > which may be the reason other experienced R developers have not > > stumbled over this ...} > > > Thanks a lot, notably also for the clear repr.ex. below. > > > Best regards, > > Martin > > OTOH, I find so many cases of deparse(*)[1] (or similar) in > R's own sources, I'm wondering > if I'm forgetting something ... and using nlines=* is not always > faster & equivalent and hence better ?? > > Martin > > > > > >> Example: > > >> fun <- function(x) { > >> stop("testing") > >> } > >> d <- rep(list(mtcars), 10000) > >> object.size(d) > >> # 72MB > > >> system.time({ > >> try(do.call(fun, args = list(x = d))) > >> }) > >> # 8s > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel