read.xlsx takes a very long time and tons of memory

Question

I'm trying to load an .xlsx file into R that has one sheet and is about 31 MB in size.

I run the following

options( java.parameters = "-Xmx6g" )
require(xlsx)
yt = read.xlsx("big_spreadsheet.xlsx",1)

and I get nothing. My system monitor program shows that the allotted memory slowly fills up and then just stays full. I haven't let it run for hours but ten minutes should be sufficient, especially when I could have just loaded into Numbers (I'm on Mavericks) and saved it as a CSV in that time.

Yes, I have much more than 6 GB of memory. 2 GB doesn't seem to be enough and yields the error:

Error in .jcall("RJavaTools", "Ljava/lang/Object;", "invokeMethod", cl,  : 
  java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space

I did, however, make the mistake of letting the rJava package install its own version of Java. I downloaded JDK 8 after the fact but I have no idea how to check if this is being used.

So why does it take 6 GB of RAM to (fail to) load a 31 MB file? Can I fix this somehow?

Answer 1

I never got this to work. I've lately been using the readxl package for reading from Excel spreadsheets, which has no Java dependency and seems to work just fine.

Answer 2

yes, use readxl package,since xlsx package require java that takes a loads of time to load and chances are more that it will return error on reading a file of mere size(even of 2mb)

Its very simple to use just write

   read_excel("path")