pipetime

⏳ pipetime measures elapsed time in R pipelines.

Insert time_pipe() anywhere in a pipeline to print or log the time since the pipeline started. It works with the native R pipe (|>) and fits naturally into tidyverse workflows.

Installation

Install from GitHub and load alongside dplyr for examples:

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

Example

Place time_pipe() at the end of a pipeline to measure total elapsed time:

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

data.frame(x = 1:3) |>
  mutate(sleep = slow_op(0.1, x)) |>
  summarise(mean_x = mean(x)) |>
  time_pipe("total pipeline") # ~+0.1 sec
#> [2025-09-28 22:40:14.332] total pipeline: +0.1061 secs
#>   mean_x
#> 1      2

Use multiple time_pipe() calls to mark steps along a pipeline:

data.frame(x = 1:5) |> 
  mutate(y = slow_op(0.5, x)) |>
  time_pipe("compute y") |> 
  mutate(z = slow_op(0.5, y)) |> 
  time_pipe("compute z") |>
  summarise(mean_z = mean(z)) |>
  time_pipe("total pipeline")
#> [2025-09-28 22:40:14.444] compute y: +0.5055 secs
#> [2025-09-28 22:40:14.444] compute z: +1.0114 secs
#> [2025-09-28 22:40:14.444] total pipeline: +1.0122 secs
#>     mean_z
#> 1 2.710958

⏱️ Each time_pipe() reports the cumulative time since the pipeline started.

Logging

📝 Use log to save timings to a hidden environment (.pipetime_env):

df <- data.frame(x = 1:5) |> 
  mutate(y = slow_op(0.5, x)) |>
  time_pipe("compute y", log = "timings") |>
  mutate(z = slow_op(0.5, y)) |>
  time_pipe("compute z", log = "timings")
#> [2025-09-28 22:40:15.460] compute y: +0.5055 secs
#> [2025-09-28 22:40:15.460] compute z: +1.0116 secs

get_log("timings")
#>             timestamp     label  duration unit
#> 1 2025-09-28 22:40:15 compute y 0.5054879 secs
#> 2 2025-09-28 22:40:15 compute z 1.0115728 secs
rm_log("timings") #delete the dataframe in .pipetime_env

Managing logs

get_log("name") → return one log
get_log(NULL) → return all logs as a named list
rm_log("name") → remove one log
rm_log(NULL, force = TRUE) → remove all logs

Options

You can also set session‑wide defaults:

options(pipetime.log = "timings",
        pipetime.console = TRUE,
        pipetime.unit = "secs")