Re: Which version on which OS is fastest and stable?

[Michael Creel]

On Monday 23 May 2005 13:33, address@hidden wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have two questions:
> Which version on what OS should I use to get good performance and which
> version does not crash when doing repeated operations on very large
> data-sets?
>
> Current situation:
> I am using the old 2.1.50 windows stand-alone binary. This works fairly
> well and is the fastest I have tested so far. But it repeatedly crashes
> when working with large amount of data, mostly it does manage to put out
> an "out of memory" error-message before disappearing. My assumption is
> that memory gets fragmented and then it fails to allocate the contigous
> memory chunks required for the data arrays. I tried to do a clear in
> between to reclaim memory but it doesn't really help.
>
> I have tested both the 2.169 and the 2.92 versions running in a
> cygwin-environment. When compiled with gcc as delivered with cygwin both
> are extremely slow and I learned from this mailing list that this is due
> to sjlj exception handling. So I recompiled gcc not to use
> sjlj-exceptions (took almost 2 hours just to compile) and then
> recompiled octave.
>
> Result:
> It appears to be more stable than the 2.1.50 windows binary, loop
> execution has sped up significantly (at least a factor of 10 compared to
> the sjlj exception version), but overall execution including file-i/o is
> still significantly slower than the 2.1.50 version.
>
> What about native linux versions? I wouldn't mind going through the
> trouble of installing linux as a second os if I knew in advance that
> then octave would be faster and more stable. Can anyone share some
> insights with me regarding these items? I do need the fastest octave I
> can get (needed: binary file-i/o, fft/stft/resample, loop execution) and
> it must be able to cope with repeated operations on very large amounts
> of data (currently it makes it through one, may be two datasets, then it
> crashes on working with the third one).
>
> Any help is greatly appreciated
>
> Thanks
> Reiner

Hello,
Octave on Linux is both fast and stable. If you would like to try it out 
before installing, I recommend the Knoppix live CD. If you boot using the CD 
and configure networking, you can then install Octave 2.1.x using the 
commands
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install octave

If you like what you see, you can easily install to hard disk in about 20 
minutes. It's one of the fastest and easiest ways to install Debian Linux.
Michael



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