How to speed up Octave

[John W. Eaton]

On 19-Jun-2001, Laubach, Mark (Nicolelis Lab) <address@hidden> wrote:

| Inspired by the recent thread titled "Octave / Win 2000 memory limitations", 
| I ran a few tests of execution speed for Octave (2.0.16, from the Mandrake 
| install disks) under Linux (Mandrake 8.0) and Windows (Win2k), and Matlab 
| (version 6) under Windows.  I was disappointed to see how slow Octave is 
| compared to Matlab on my home PC (Athlon 700 MHz with 256 MB SDRAM).  (I 
| obtained a similar pattern of results on my (slower) notebook.)  Can someone 
| please suggest how I might improve execution speeds for Octave, especially 
| under Linux? 
| 
| The tests I ran were:
| 
| tic;A=rand(20,20000);B=svd(A);toc
| tic;A=rand(2000,2000);B=prod(A);toc
| tic;A=rand(1000,1000);B=inv(A)*A;toc

I believe all of these operations involve calls to lapack and/or blas
libraries.  If you use a recent development version of Octave linked
with the atlas libraries, then you will probably see some improvement.

jwe



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