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Octave interpreter slowness
From: |
John Swensen |
Subject: |
Octave interpreter slowness |
Date: |
Wed, 15 Mar 2006 15:40:36 -0700 |
User-agent: |
Thunderbird 1.4.1 (Windows/20051006) |
In some recent work, I wasn't able to get our companies' only Matlab
Statistics toolbox license, so I switched to octave for a week or two.
I noticed that the poisson random function in octave took orders of
magnitude longer than Matlab's implementation. This led me to do a
simple experiment. I ran the following script on the same computer with
both Matlab and Octave (WinXP with Cygwin Octave release vs. Matlab
7.something), with very interesting results.
-------------------------------
tic
size = 1000000;
var = zeros(1,size);
for i = 1:size
var(i) = rand();
end
sum(var)
ElapsedTime = toc
-------------------------------
Matlab (10 runs) - Ave = 2.0818 seconds
Octave (10 runs) - Ave = 19.911 seconds
Since this is a fairly simple script with a lot of iterations, does this
indicate that the discrepency is caused somewhere in the parsing
portions of Octave? I tried the test again with the rand() call
eliminated with similar differences in execution times. I then tried
the script in Octave on a faster PC running Ubuntu with some
improvements (15 seconds per).
John Swensen
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