title: Fastest way to import SPSS data into R as dataframe
body: <p>I need to import an SPSS .sav file into R every day as a data frame without value labels. The file is 120,000+ obs and growing.  This process is getting incredibly slow, so I want to make sure I'm using the fastest possible method. I've been playing around with the functions in foreign, haven, and memisc. I'm working with RDS if that makes a difference.</p>
  
  <p>Edit: My file is 126343 x 33067 and 12.1 GB.I'm just simply running the following code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>library(haven)
  data &lt;- read_sav(file)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I can't share this file, but to attempt to replicate, I did:</p>
  
  <pre><code>library(haven)
  n &lt;- 126343
  exd &lt;- data.frame(c(replicate(2000, sample(letters, n, replace = TRUE),
                                simplify = FALSE),
                      replicate(1306, runif(n),
                                simplify = FALSE)))
  dim(exd)
  ## [1] 126343    3306
  tmp &lt;- tempfile(fileext = ".sav")
  write_sav(exd, tmp)
  system.time(exd2 &lt;- read_sav(tmp))
  ##   user  system elapsed 
  ##  173.34   13.94   187.66 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>