Efficiency of Importing Large CSV Files in R

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### size of csv file: 689.4MB (7,009,728 rows * 29 columns) ###

system.time(read.csv('../data/2008.csv', header = T))
#   user  system elapsed 
# 88.301   2.416  90.716

library(data.table)
system.time(fread('../data/2008.csv', header = T, sep = ',')) 
#   user  system elapsed 
#  4.740   0.048   4.785

library(bigmemory)
system.time(read.big.matrix('../data/2008.csv', header = T))
#   user  system elapsed 
# 59.544   0.764  60.308

library(ff)
system.time(read.csv.ffdf(file = '../data/2008.csv', header = T))
#   user  system elapsed 
# 60.028   1.280  61.335 

library(sqldf)
system.time(read.csv.sql('../data/2008.csv'))
#   user  system elapsed 
# 87.461   3.880  91.447

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