Setting up R in a new work environment consumes a lot of time as installtion and building of packages and associated dependencies is single threaded by default.

Install dependencies concurrently

Ncpu

Set MAKEFLAGS env variable

Sys.setenv(MAKEFLAGS = sprintf(“-j%d”, parallel::detectCores())) #Set the number of cores

Use CCache

Other methos of improvement

• Select a faster mirror
• Install binaries from Ubuntu repo
• Use Conda/Miniconda to manage dependencies