performance - Trouble converting long list of data.frames (~1 million) to single data.frame using do.call and ldply

Question

I know there are many questions here in SO about ways to convert a list of data.frames to a single data.frame using do.call or ldply, but this questions is about understanding the inner workings of both methods and trying to figure out why I can't get either to work for concatenating a list of almost 1 million df's of the same structure, same field names, etc. into a single data.frame. Each data.frame is of one row and 21 columns.

The data started out as a JSON file, which I converted to lists using fromJSON, then ran another lapply to extract part of the list and converted to data.frame and ended up with a list of data.frames.

I've tried:

df <- do.call("rbind", list)
df <- ldply(list)

but I've had to kill the process after letting it run up to 3 hours and not getting anything back.

Is there a more efficient method of doing this? How can I troubleshoot what is happening and why is it taking so long?

FYI - I'm using RStudio server on a 72GB quad-core server with RHEL, so I don't think memory is the problem. sessionInfo below:

> sessionInfo()
R version 2.14.1 (2011-12-22)
Platform: x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
 [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
 [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
 [7] LC_PAPER=C                 LC_NAME=C                 
 [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] multicore_0.1-7 plyr_1.7.1      rjson_0.2.6    

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] tools_2.14.1
> 

Answer 1

rbind.data.frame does a lot of checking you don't need. This should be a pretty quick transformation if you only do exactly what you want.

# Use data from Josh O'Brien's post.
set.seed(21)
X <- replicate(50000, data.frame(a=rnorm(5), b=1:5), simplify=FALSE)
system.time({
Names <- names(X[[1]])  # Get data.frame names from first list element.
# For each name, extract its values from each data.frame in the list.
# This provides a list with an element for each name.
Xb <- lapply(Names, function(x) unlist(lapply(X, `[[`, x)))
names(Xb) <- Names          # Give Xb the correct names.
Xb.df <- as.data.frame(Xb)  # Convert Xb to a data.frame.
})
#    user  system elapsed 
#   3.356   0.024   3.388 
system.time(X1 <- do.call(rbind, X))
#    user  system elapsed 
# 169.627   6.680 179.675
identical(X1,Xb.df)
# [1] TRUE

Inspired by the data.table answer, I decided to try and make this even faster. Here's my updated solution, to try and keep the check mark. ;-)

# My "rbind list" function
rbl.ju <- function(x) {
  u <- unlist(x, recursive=FALSE)
  n <- names(u)
  un <- unique(n)
  l <- lapply(un, function(N) unlist(u[N==n], FALSE, FALSE))
  names(l) <- un
  d <- as.data.frame(l)
}
# simple wrapper to rbindlist that returns a data.frame
rbl.dt <- function(x) {
  as.data.frame(rbindlist(x))
}

library(data.table)
if(packageVersion("data.table") >= '1.8.2') {
  system.time(dt <- rbl.dt(X))  # rbindlist only exists in recent versions
}
#    user  system elapsed 
#    0.02    0.00    0.02
system.time(ju <- rbl.ju(X))
#    user  system elapsed 
#    0.05    0.00    0.05 
identical(dt,ju)
# [1] TRUE