Grouped calculations of list columns are very slow

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
r
Domain
data, performance

Research direction

Start by reproducing the two grouped calculations shown in the issue and compare their timings. Trace the grouped list-column calculation path to find why the second call is disproportionately slower; done means its runtime is no longer about three times the first call while preserving the demonstrated results.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

performance

Calculations get very slow when we create list columns. Consider these two calls:

dt <- data.table::data.table(x = sample(10000, 10000000, TRUE), y = sample(10000, 10000000, TRUE), z = sample(10000, 10000000, TRUE))
system.time(dt[, .I, by = c("x", "y")])
system.time(dt[, .(.(.I)), by = c("x", "y")])

The second one should take about 3 times as long as the first one, which is not really reasonable (especially since the first call is not particularly fast, compared to more typical calculations).

Dominant language
R
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Merged PRs (30d)
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