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RE: using binary octave 2.9.12


From: Michael Goffioul
Subject: RE: using binary octave 2.9.12
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 11:13:47 +0200

Here are some comments about the problems reported.

1) octave is bloated

Many things have been added to octave since 2.1.50a. Moreover, the
installer includes support libraries/tools that take up some space: ATLAS
libraries, VC2005 runtime libs, Console2, gnuplot, SciTE, octplot, MSYS...

2) startup time

The package manager is largely responsible for the startup time. Moreover,
if jhandles is loaded by default, the java runtime will also be loaded at
startup. As David aready said, reducing the number of packages loaded
by default should improve startup time significantly.

3) windows size and gnuplot window coming to front

Octave is executed within Windows command prompt, which is quite
small by default. Under WinXP, this command windows is configurable
in size and font: right-click on the top-left corner and choose "Properties".
On closing the dialog, save settings for all windows with the same name.
The plot window always coming to front is gnuplot's fault. I guess this is
configurable, but I don't know how.

4) octave plot is slow

By default, the gnuplot terminal is set to wxt: this new terminal in gnuplot
4.2 looks much nicer that older windows terminal, but it is significantly
slower, especially for 3d plots. Changing the default terminal to "win" should
improve things, but I don't know how to do it from octave. There are other
alternatives for graphics backend: take a look at jhandles, which is able to
do 3D plots (use "pkg load jhandles" to load it).

5) crash on exit

Known problems. I tried to address it, but it's a very nasty one, difficult to
track, because it's embedded in signal catching and C stack unwinding
(and I didn't write that code). For the time being, my only advise is to use
"quit" at octave prompt.

benchmarks

A few months ago, I ran the benchmark script from
http://www.sciviews.org/benchmark/index.html, and Octave/MSVC didn't
show
that bad and was even better than cygwin/2.1.73. When comparing with Matlab,
the only area where octave performed bad was with "for" loops; all other results
were comparable with Matlab.

Michael.


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