benchmark for octave 2.0.5

[John W. Eaton]

On  7-Mar-1997, Francesco Potorti` <address@hidden> wrote:

| Since octave 2 is now available in binary distribution form and looks
| stable, I would like to upgrade the octave benchmark in order to get
| reference times relative to octave 2.0.5 for the Sun Sparc 10 / super
| 40, which I selected as the reference machine, in analogy with the
| reference used for the Spec95 numbers (suggestion by Rick Niles).
| 
| So, if someone with a Sun Sparc 10 is willing to run the benchmark on
| an unloaded machine, I will send to them the benchmark modified to run
| under octave 2.  Once I get the results, I'll code them inside
| benchmark.m and publish it, so people can run it on their machines and
| we can have an updated performance list of the machines Octave runs
| on.

If we need to have a reference machine, I think it would be best to
use something that is more widely available (sorry Rick).  Something
like a Pentium NNN running Linux (I vote for NNN == 133, since that's
what I happen to have, but maybe it would be better to use something a
bit faster).

Also, how about keeping the results obtained with older versions of
Octave (at least for runs on the reference machine) so that we can
easily see if Octave is getting faster or slower as it gets older.

| If someone has good reasons why we should change the reference
| machine, let us discuss them on octave-sources.

I would prefer to only have source code posted to octave-sources.
The help-octave group is fine for discussions as well as requests for
help.

Thanks,

jwe