Re: Slowup in 2.1.54

[Paul Kienzle]

On Feb 18, 2004, at 7:14 PM, David Bateman wrote:

> In any case this benchmark pretty much explains much of my recent
> contributions. The stuff I did on sort and randn recently in
> octave-forge, also the eigenvalue patch that doesn't calculate
> eignevectors if you don't want them, and the FFT stuff. With these
> changes and the fact the 2.1.42 didn't properly use LAPACK/ATLAS,
> where Octave does now, I estimate the final total in this benchmark
> for the CVS version of octave to have come down from 27.76 to about 15
> or 16. Whether this reflects the speedup a real user will see is
> more questionable however....

I certainly appreciate your work.  sort in particular is used
in many places it shouldn't be because it can avoid a
scripted for-loop. O(n log n) is faster than O(n) even on
large problems  if the constants are large enough.

So there is a direct benefit for things like hist and interp1.

Similarly, fft is used all over the place, so speedups here
affect much more than just the fft.

Fast random number generators are important in many
contexts, but maybe not so much in a scripted environment.
With a little massaging, though, we can have something
state of the art useful outside of octave.

Again, thanks!

Paul Kienzle
address@hidden