Calling R from Java - Faster alternative to RCalle

Question

I tried RCaller 2.0 to call R functions from Java and I managed to make it work after a few tries. Integration was pretty easy but RCaller is kinda slow at runtime. I'm afraid that RCaller 2.0 won't be suitable for my application since I have to repeatedly call the same script thousands of times and the latency introduced by this library is unacceptable for my needs.

Is there a faster (in terms of run-time execution time) alternative for calling R scripts from Java?

Answer 1

Is there any way to push some of the iteration over into R, so that you're calling it much less often? Maybe you can pass in an array of data, with an array of scripts to run, where you're passing them in one by one now.

Answer 2

Try Renjin, it seems pretty fast at least!

Answer 3

Rcaller has many performance improvements that came with the version 2.1. It now supports passing commands to R in a loop using a single R process. That is, there is no more system calls after the initializing process.

Answer 4

Have a look at the test file in RCaller source tree: https://code.google.com/p/rcaller/source/browse/RCaller/src/test/java/rcaller/RunOnlineTest.java

This test file includes sequential commands that run on a single R process. This way is said to be fast.