[R] Reducing of car package when loading

[Brian Bolt]

I have a non-CRAN package that has a large number of dependencies and as such, the memory footprint from loading my package in R is becoming larger.  I use Rapache often to pre-load my package and provide web services for my code, so the consistent memory footprint is hurting other processes on the machine.

I have created an R docker container and when I start R, the memory footprint is 27.89MB, after loading the car package, the memory footprint shoots up to 131.4MB. A difference of 103.51MB.  For comparison, loading ggplot2 only gives a difference of 9.32MB.

Is there something I can do, without removing dependencies, that could relieve some of my memory footprint?  To be clear, I am not just asking about the car package but reducing memory dependence in general.  Can I force the R package loader to only load functions from packages that I am dependent on? Is there a way to not load all of the datasets? 

Thanks,
Brian



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