BIEN_trait_mean performance

[achmurzy]

I'm trying to pull as many trait means as possible for the following list of species: names.txt

Using vectorized versions of BIEN_trait_mean(vector_of_species_names, vector_of_traits) usually crashes my R console. I'm not sure if its on the backend, but returning the list of trait ids by default could be part of the issue. Maybe we could add a flag to optionally add the list of trait IDs? It greatly increases the size of the data frame that gets returned, and it would be nice if it were optional.

So what I'm doing now is querying means one-by-one: for species in species_list: for trait in trait_list: BIEN_trait_mean(species, trait) rbind(traits, new_trait) This isn't the 'R' way of doing it but it works quickly - vectorizing a list of 20 species crashes my console.