Question

How can I pause sleep wait execution for X seconds in R

Answer 1

You can try the following piece of code to do so:

speedtest <- function(a)
{
    p1 <- proc.time()
    Sys.sleep(a)
    proc.time() - p1 # The cpu usage should be negligible
}
speedtest(4.8)

You can check the info on Sys.sleep by typing ?Sys.sleep on your console.