Very slow plotting of large data sets under Windows

[Stephen Glow]

Hi All;

I'm running Octave 2.1.50 under Windows 2000 and have noticed that 
plotting any large set of data points takes a very long time (minutes).  
The problem seems to be that the data is written to an ASCII text file, 
and then gnuplot reads the data points from this file for plotting.  
This works fine for small data sets, but when working with large sets 
(say 1,000,000 points) the overhead of writing all this to disk is 
rather extreem.

Is there any easy work around for this problem (other then not using 
large data sets that is)?  At a minimum it seems like the data could be 
saved in binary format which would save the conversion time 
(binary->ASCII->binary) and compress the file size by a factor of about 3:1.

Does the linux version of Octave suffer from the same problem?

Are there any better graphics programs that work with Octave and are 
available under Windows?

Thanks for any suggestions,

Steve



-------------------------------------------------------------
Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Octave's home on the web:  http://www.octave.org
How to fund new projects:  http://www.octave.org/funding.html
Subscription information:  http://www.octave.org/archive.html
-------------------------------------------------------------