How to improve speed of ggplot bar chart when plotting >1000 points?

I'm producing a bar chart for 1200 observations using ggplot2. Each of these observations has an error bar. There's also an average shown (using geom_line) for these observations overall.

I'm finding the running time is very slow (2 seconds) in comparison to less observations (e.g. if 500 or were used <1 second). Also, all observations must be a seperate bar.

I realise it doesn't sound like much time, but this time adds up overall for what I need to do - producing over 100 of these plots and knitting them to rmd file.

Below is a piece of code I've created to replicate the issue - this is using ggplot2 inbuilt diamonds dataset.

diamonds1 <- as.data.frame(mutate(diamonds, upper = x + 1.2, lower = x - 0.4))    diamonds2 <- diamonds1 %>%    group_by(cut) %>%    summarize(Mean = mean(x, na.rm=TRUE))    ChosenCut <- "VVS28451"  diamonds3 <- left_join(diamonds1 ,diamonds2, by = c("cut" = "cut") ) %>%    filter(cut == "Very Good") %>%    mutate(ID = paste0(clarity,row_number() )) %>%    mutate(CutType = case_when(ID==ChosenCut ~ ID,                                                                   TRUE ~ "  Other Cut"),           CutLabel = ifelse(ID == ChosenCut, "Your Cut", ""))    diamonds4 <- diamonds3[order(-xtfrm(diamonds3$CutLabel)),]  diamonds4 <- diamonds4[1:1255,]    DiamondCutChart = diamonds4 %>%     ggplot(aes(x = reorder(ID, x),                y = x)) +     geom_bar(aes(fill=CutType), stat = "identity", width = 1) +      geom_errorbar(aes(ymin = lower, ymax = upper)) +     geom_text(aes(label = CutLabel),               position = position_stack(vjust = 0.5),               size = 2.7, angle = 90, fontface = "bold") +    geom_line(aes(y = diamonds4$Mean), group = 1, linetype=2, colour = "#0000ff") +     scale_fill_manual(values = c("#32572C", "#41B1B1")) +    annotate("text", x = 1, y = diamonds4$Mean, hjust =0, vjust = -0.5,              size = 3.2, colour = "#0000ff",             label=paste0("Mean ",diamonds4$Mean)) +    theme_classic()+     theme(axis.title.x=element_blank(),           axis.title.y=element_blank(),          axis.text.x=element_blank(),          axis.ticks.x=element_blank(),          legend.position = "top") +     labs(fill = "")       StartTime = Sys.time()    DiamondCutChart  EndTime = Sys.time()  EndTime - StartTime  

When running this, it takes around 2 seconds. I need this to be less than 1 second to be able to produce multiple plots and rmarkdown outputs in less overall time.

How can I reduce the time it takes to plot the graph from the piece of code?

Any help or pointing in the right direction is greatly appreciated.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65756639/how-to-improve-speed-of-ggplot-bar-chart-when-plotting-1000-points January 17, 2021 at 10:05AM