[R] R code for performance

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 6 Jun 2005 v.demartino2 at virgilio.it wrote:

> At office I'm cautiously introducing R to be used as the basic statistical
> program, getting rid of licensed stuff or reducing the amount of it.
> The aim of R would be to run generic statistical programs built & "consumed"
> when needed and some static procedure dealing with time-series.
> Now, we have substantially 3 OS platforms, win xp, linux and freebsd 5.4,
> on similar PCs (pentium 4, 2-2.5 GHz). I have been asked by the boss to
> test the "average" performance (in term of speed and memory use) of R on
> each of this platform to stick with one of them on a couple of PCs.
>
> Could you please suggest an R source code (apart from the "static procedure"
> I will obviously test) to be run on the three platforms to test performance?
>
> If there is nothing of the kind, any suggestion?

'make check' runs a lot of R code and times it.  The tests for the stats 
package look most relevant to you.  Beware of simplistic 'benchmarks' that 
test code snippets not relevant to your usage (and that may apply to the R 
examples which tend to be small datasets).

We know Linux (non-R-shlib) outperforms Windows XP by ca 20%, and some 
comments I have seen here suggest it outperforms FreeBSD as well.  But are 
such differences enough to determine your choice?

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595