introduction

The pipetime package lets you measure how long your pipeline (|>) operations take. It works with the native R pipe and fits naturally into tidy workflows.

# devtools::install_github("CyGei/pipetime")
library(pipetime)
library(dplyr)

Example

Place time_pipe() at any point in a pipeline to measure elapsed time from the start up to that point:

data.frame(x = 1:3) |>
  mutate(sleep = Sys.sleep(0.1)) |> # e.g. a complex operation
  summarise(mean_x = mean(x)) |>
  time_pipe("total pipeline") # ~0.1 sec
#> [2025-08-15 15:12:30.149] total pipeline: 0.1083 secs
#>   mean_x
#> 1      2

• The timing includes all operations before time_pipe().

• You can insert multiple time_pipe() calls to create checkpoints along the pipeline:

complex_fn <- function(duration,x) {
  Sys.sleep(duration)  # Simulate a time-consuming operation
  rnorm(n = length(x), mean = x, sd = 1)
}

data.frame(x = 1:5) |> 
  dplyr::mutate(y = complex_fn(0.5, x)) |>
  time_pipe("compute y") |> 
  dplyr::mutate(z = complex_fn(0.5, y)) |> 
  time_pipe("compute z") |>
  dplyr::summarise(mean_z = mean(z)) |>
  time_pipe("total pipeline")
#> [2025-08-15 15:12:30.327] compute y: 0.5022 secs
#> [2025-08-15 15:12:30.327] compute z: 1.0070 secs
#> [2025-08-15 15:12:30.327] total pipeline: 1.0093 secs
#>     mean_z
#> 1 2.117271

• Each time_pipe() reports the cumulative time since the start of the pipeline.

Logging to a File

You can save timing logs to a file using the log_file argument:

log <- tempfile(fileext = ".log")

df <- data.frame(x = 1:5) |> 
  dplyr::mutate(y = complex_fn(0.1, x)) |>
  time_pipe("compute y", log_file = log, console = FALSE ) |> 
  dplyr::mutate(z = complex_fn(0.1, y)) |> 
  time_pipe("compute z", log_file = log, console = FALSE) |>
  dplyr::summarise(mean_z = mean(z)) |>
  time_pipe("total pipeline",log_file = log, console = FALSE)

readLines(log)
#> [1] "[2025-08-15 15:12:31.404] compute y: 0.1017 secs "     
#> [2] "[2025-08-15 15:12:31.404] compute z: 0.2038 secs "     
#> [3] "[2025-08-15 15:12:31.404] total pipeline: 0.2053 secs "