I have been reading about how read.table is not efficient for large data files. Also how R is not suited for large data sets. So I was wondering where I can find what the practical limits are and any performance charts for (1) Reading in data of various sizes (2) working with data of varying sizes. 

In effect, I want to know when the performance deteriorates and when I hit a road block. Also any comparison against C++/MATLAB or other languages would be really helpful. finally if there is any special performance comparison for Rcpp and RInside, that would be great!