R/octave/matlab etc.

Hello,

I don't think that the large disparity in loop performance between
Matlab, R, and Octave is explained by compilation time performance
settings.  For Octave, it is well known that loops perform poorly
relative to Matlab (though many other operations perform better).  The
reason is that Matlab has the just in time (JIT) compiler, and it is
responsible for almost all of the loop speed advantage.

Have a good day,

Bill

-----Original Message-----
From: John C Nash [mailto:nashjc at uottawa.ca]
Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2009 1:51 PM
To: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: [R] R/octave/matlab etc.

I'd echo a lot of what has been said about this by the folk who have
been making R work so well. One of the main difficulties is that the
environment of computations affects relative performance. e.g., what
settings did a distro package builder choose. I note that my 3 GHz Dual
Core machine running Ubuntu 8.04 gets

octave 3.0.0

octave:6>   tic; a = a + 1; toc
Elapsed time is 0.120027 seconds.

octave:16>   tic;  for i=1:1e7; a(i) = a(i) + 1; end;   toc;
Elapsed time is 238.311 seconds.


R2.8.1

a <- rep(1,10000000)
system.time(a <- a + 1)

  user  system elapsed
 0.080   0.064   0.146

system.time(for (i in 1:10000000) {a[i] <- a[i] + 1})

  user  system elapsed
68.092   0.160  68.745

R looks pretty good in this comparison. I suspect Ubuntu has a rather
low optimization level or similar for octave.

As Jean G. has indicated, tests may measure the wrong sorts of things.
Nonetheless, there is a value -- they can help us check that builds have

been done with the right setup. And if we get very disparate performance

on machines of supposedly similar capability, we may need to look into
the awful details.

JN


Notice:  This e-mail message, together with any attachme...{{dropped:12}}