I am following the unionSpatialPolygons code outlined here to combine the zipcodes of the US into states with two states combined. I have successfully done this on a smaller scale, but to do this for 30K+ zipcodes is taking forever on my laptop (16 GB RAM, Intel i5 2.8 GHz). If I were to leverage AWS to get a bigger computer for this exercise, should it be optimized for I/O, RAM, Processing? Is there something else I can do in the code to make it faster?
library(rgdal)library(maptools)library(gridExtra)library(gpclib)library(zipcode)gpclibPermint()dsn
library(rgdal)library(maptools)library(gridExtra)library(gpclib)library(zipcode)gpclibPermint()dsn