[R] Computational speed question

[David Vonka]

Hello,

I'm doing bootstrap in R 2.4.1 in order to compute standard errors of an 
estimator. I'm running the same program on 4 computers. The core of the 
program is a nlm minimization of a function, which is (I believe) nicely 
coded using (t)apply and all the vectorized stuff.

I'm slightly puzzled by the differences in the speed of computation. The 
program works twice as fast on a two years old Celeron (256 MB, running 
Ubuntu Dapper Linux) than on a P4 (1GB, Windows 2000 + Novell) and the 
speed of that Celeron is comparable with an other P4 (1GB, Ubuntu Feisty 
Linux). In general (outside R, text editing, whatever), the Celeron is 
much slower than any of the two P4.

Is there any reason for this ? Is R better optimized for Linux ? Some 
options I might have used when installing R on one of the Linuxes and 
not on the other one ?

Thanks for an answer.

David Vonka