When profiling code, the Rprof() function tells you how much time was spent in each function. Those functions that consume the most time are the most obvious candidates for making faster. However, it is also useful or important to know how often these functions were called. If we have two functions A and B, each consuming 60 minutes in the profiling, but A is called once and B is called 6 million times, often we might focus on A.

To count the number of times a particular function is called, we can use trace(), e.g.,

trace(attr, incrementAttrCounter)

incrementAttrCounter would be a function that adds one to a variable that we use to count the number of times attr() is called. Even better, we define a closure to create a generic, reusable counter

mkCounter =
function()
{
   ctr = 0L
   inc = function() ctr <<- ctr + 1L
   list(inc = inc, 
        value = function() ctr, 
        reset = function() ctr <<- 0L)
}

Now we can use

attrCtr = mkCounter()
trace(attr, attrCtr$inc)

Then we run our code and when it finishes, we query the number of times attr() was called with

attrCtr$value()

If we want to count the number of calls to several functions, we can create a separate counter closure for each. Alternatively, we can create a single counter that keeps the counts for all of the functions in a named vector. Instead of passing the incrementing function to trace(), we call the incrementing function with the name of the function and then update the corresponding named element in our vector of counts, e.g.,

trace(dnorm, quote(ctr$inc("dnorm")))
trace(rnorm, quote(ctr$inc("rnorm")))

Rather than have the user explicitly create the counters and call trace(), this package provides higher-level functions to do these steps for you. For counting calls to a single function, use countCalls(), e.g.,

ctr = countMCalls(rnorm)
replicate(10, rnorm(0))
ctr$value()

For counting calls to multiple functions, use countMCalls(), e.g.,

ctr = countMCalls(dnorm, rnorm)
replicate(10, dnorm(0))
replicate(7, rnorm(1))
dnorm(1)
ctr$value()

ctr = countMCalls(funs = c("dnorm", "rnorm"))
replicate(10, dnorm(0))
replicate(7, rnorm(1))
dnorm(1)
ctr$value()

See inst/profilingEg/ for an example of how to use this with profiling information.

Call Stack

It can be useful to collect the call stack so that we can see from where it was called. From eg.R,

source("eg.R")
st = genStackCollector(num = 500)
trace(f, st$update, print = FALSE)
invisible (  k()  )
z = st$value()
z[[1]]

To get just the names of the functions being called (and not the actual calls and arguments), we use callNames as a filtering/preprocessing function on the calls before we store them:

st = genStackCollector(callNames, num = 500)
trace(f, st$update, print = FALSE)
invisible (  k()  )
z = st$value()
z[[1]]