How to speed up Octave

[Laubach, Mark (Nicolelis Lab)]

Hi,

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

ave of 10 runs (in sec): 1.032 Octave/Linux, 1.042 Octave/Win2k, 0.610 Matlab

tic;A=rand(2000,2000);B=prod(A);toc

ave of 10 runs (in sec): 3.560 Octave/Linux, 3.415 Octave/Win2k, 0.721 Matlab

tic;A=rand(1000,1000);B=inv(A)*A;toc

ave of 10 runs (in sec): 67.734 Octave/Linux, 62.700 Octave/Win2k, 7.44 Matlab

Also, I've noticed that Octave is slightly faster the second time a given 
piece of code is run.  Can someone explain why this is?

Thanks in advance.

Best regards,

Mark Laubach



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