efficient use of raster functions in r - r

Question

I have 500+ points in a SpatialPointsDataFrame object; I have a 1.7GB (200,000 rows x 200,000 cols) raster object. I want to have a tabulation of the values of the raster cells within a buffer around each of the 500+ points.
I have managed to achieve that with the code below (I got a lot of inspiration from here.). However, it is slow to run and I would like to make it run faster. It actually runs OK for buffers with "small" widths, say 5km ro even 15km (~1 million cells), but it becomes super slow when buffer increases to say 100km (~42 million cells).
I could easily improve on the loop below by using something from the apply family and/or a parallel loop. But my suspicion is that it is slow because the raster package writes 400Mb+ temporary files for each interaction of the loop.
# packages
library(rgeos)
library(raster)
library(rgdal)
myPoints = readOGR(points_path, 'myLayer')
myRaster = raster(raster_path)
myFunction = function(polygon_obj, raster_obj) {
# this function return a tabulation of the values of raster cells
# inside a polygon (buffer)
# crop to extent of polygon
clip1 = crop(raster_obj, extent(polygon_obj))
# crops to polygon edge & converts to raster
clip2 = rasterize(polygon_obj, clip1, mask = TRUE)
# much faster than extract
ext = getValues(clip2)
# tabulates the values of the raster in the polygon
tab = table(ext)
return(tab)
}
# loop over the points
ids = unique(myPoints$ID)
for (id in ids) {
# select point
myPoint = myPoints[myPoints$ID == id, ]
# create buffer
myPolygon = gBuffer(spgeom = myPoint, byid = FALSE, width = myWidth)
# extract the data I want (projections, etc are fine)
tab = myFunction(myPolygon, myRaster)
# do stuff with tab ...
}
My questions:
Am I right to partially blame the writing operations? If I managed to avoid all those writing operations, would this code run faster? I have access to a machine with 32GB of RAM -- so I guess it is safe to assume I could load the raster to the memory and need not to write temporary files?
What else could I do to improve efficiency in this code?

Answer 1

I think you should approach it like this
library(raster)
library(rgdal)
myPoints <- readOGR(points_path, 'myLayer')
myRaster <- raster(raster_path)
e <- extract(myRaster, myPoints, buffer=myWidth)
And then something like
etab <- sapply(e, table)
It is hard to answer your question #1 as we do not know enough about your data (we do not know how many cells are covered by a "100 km" buffer). But you can set options about when to write to file with the rasterOptions function. You notice that getValues is faster than extract, based on the post you link to, but I think that is wrong, or at least not very important. The combination of crop, rasterize and getValues should have a similar performance as extract (which does almost exactly that under the hood). If you go this route anyway, you should pass an empty RasterLayer, created by raster(myRaster) for faster cropping.