[R] R badly lags matlab on performance?

[Stefan Grosse]

> I don't have octave (on the same machine) to compare these with.
> And I don't have MatLab at all. So I can't provide a comparison
> on that front, I'm afraid.
> Ted.
>   

Just to add some timings, I was running 1000 repetitions (adding up to
a=1001) on a notebook with core 2 duo T7200

R 2.8.1 on Fedora 10: mean 0.10967, st.dev 0.005238
R 2.8.1 on Windows Vista: mean 0.13245, st.dev 0.00943

Octave 3.0.3 on Fedora 10: mean 0.097276, st.dev 0.0041296

Matlab 2008b on Windows Vista: 0.0626 st.dev 0.005

But I am not sure how representative this is with that very simple
example. To compare Matlab speed with R a kind of benchmark suite is
necessary. Like: http://www.sciviews.org/benchmark/index.html but that
one is very old. I would guess that there did not change much: sometimes
R is faster, sometimes not.

This difference between the Windows and Linux timing is probably not
really relevant: when I was comparing the timings of my usual analysis
there was no difference between the two operating systems. (count data
and time series stuff)

Cheers
Stefan