groupby optimization

[jangorecki]

explained once by @mattdowle, so providing here

Q: does GForce allocate mem for biggest group, then copy there values of a group, to aggregate, so it can benefit from being contiguous in memory and will be more cache efficient? if so, do we check if groups aren't sorted already? so we can avoid doing allocation and copy?

gforce (gsum) assigns to many group results at once; it doesn't gather the groups together. You're describing non-gforce (dogroup.c) which copies to the largest group. See the branch in dogroups.c which knows whether groups are already grouped: it swithes to a memcpy. The memcpy is very fast (contiguous, pre-fetch) so it's pretty good already. We must copy because R's DATAPTR is not a pointer we can repoint, it's an offset from SEXP.