R help - May 2007 - Efficiently reading random lines form a large file

I need to read two different random lines at a time from a large 
ASCII file (120 x 296976) containing space delimited 0-1 entries.

The following code does the job and it's reasonable fast for my needs:

   lineNumber = sample(120, 2)
   line1 = scan(filename, what = "integer", skip=lineNumber[1]-1,
nlines=1)
   line2 = scan(filename, what = "integer", skip=lineNumber[2]-1,
nlines=1)

 > system.time(for (i in 50){
+   lineNumber = sample(120, 2)
+   line1 = scan(filename, what = "integer", skip=lineNumber[1]-1,
nlines=1)
+   line2 = scan(filename, what = "integer", skip=lineNumber[2]-1,
nlines=1)
+ })

Read 296976 items
Read 296976 items
[1] 14.24  0.12 14.51    NA    NA

However, I'm wondering if there's an even faster way to do this. Is
there?

 > sessionInfo()
R version 2.4.1 (2006-12-18)
i386-pc-mingw32

Juan Pablo Lewinger
Department of Preventive Medicine
Keck School of Medicine
University of Southern California
1540 Alcazar Street, CHP-220
Los Angeles, CA 90089-9011, USA

On Tue, 2007-05-15 at 16:02 -0700, Juan Pablo Lewinger
wrote:
> I need to read two different random lines at a time from a large 
> ASCII file (120 x 296976) containing space delimited 0-1 entries.
> 
> The following code does the job and it's reasonable fast for my needs:
> 
>    lineNumber = sample(120, 2)
>    line1 = scan(filename, what = "integer", skip=lineNumber[1]-1,
nlines=1)
>    line2 = scan(filename, what = "integer", skip=lineNumber[2]-1,
nlines=1)
> 
>  > system.time(for (i in 50){
> +   lineNumber = sample(120, 2)
> +   line1 = scan(filename, what = "integer",
skip=lineNumber[1]-1, nlines=1)
> +   line2 = scan(filename, what = "integer",
skip=lineNumber[2]-1, nlines=1)
> + })
> 
> Read 296976 items
> Read 296976 items
> [1] 14.24  0.12 14.51    NA    NA
> 
> However, I'm wondering if there's an even faster way to do this. Is
there?
You might want to take a look at this post by Jim Holtman from earlier
in the year for some ideas:

http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/e2/help/07/02/9709.html

HTH,

Marc Schwartz