Re: how to improve the speed of octave?

[Quentin Spencer]

frank wang wrote:
> On 9/15/06, *David Bateman* <address@hidden 
> <mailto:address@hidden>> wrote:
>
>     frank wang wrote:
>     > Hi,
>     >
>     > I am trying to use octave for a big project. It is written in
>     matlab.
>     > When I run the code on octave, it is significantly slow. The code
>     > involes a lot of fft operation. I have compiled the octave 2.9.8 by
>     > myself. How can I compile the octave to make it run faster? Do I
>     need
>     > to install Atlas, fftw3, blas, lapack or other packages?
>     >
>     > Thanks
>     >
>     > Frank
>     >
>     What platform and distribution are you running on? There are pre-built
>     packages including such external dependencies for most platforms. I'd
>     suggest using one of these rather than installing all of the external
>     dependencies yourself..
>
>     D.
>
>
> I am running on Suse 10.1.

I see libraries for fftw3 in 
http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-10.1/inst-source/suse/i586/. 
You need to install the fftw3-devel library before you compile octave. 
(By the way, it looks like SuSE has octave 2.1.72 precompiled, and I 
would guess it is linked to fftw3, if you don't need the 2.9.x 
features). You should be aware that octave will still be slower than 
recent versions of Matlab if you use a lot of for loops. Code involving 
mostly fftw and vector operations should be similar in speed (if you 
have atlas).

Quentin