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Re: [S] Status of S-Plus 5.x; Windows Postscript Driver

To: Frank E Harrell Jr <fharrell@virginia.edu>
Subject: Re: [S] Status of S-Plus 5.x; Windows Postscript Driver
From: Prof Brian D Ripley <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 23:07:10 +0100 (BST)
Cc: s-news <s-news@wubios.wustl.edu>
In-reply-to: <14238.8633.910000.863160@gargle.gargle.HOWL>
Sender: owner-s-news@wubios.wustl.edu
On Tue, 27 Jul 1999, Frank E Harrell Jr wrote:

> There are two areas for which I would appreciate hearing about the current
> status.
> 
> 1. I have been seeing a fair amount of negative comments about the
>    speed of 5.x.  5.x was hailed as a major improvement in speed when
>    it was launched.  Part of the reason for my asking is that I am
>    getting some requests to modify my Hmisc and Design libraries to
>    run in 5.x.  I am not inclined to do so until the speed issue has
>    been settled or until 5.x is available on Windows/NT.  I have seen
>    posts where 5.x is very slow compared with 3.4, and others where
>    there is a slight improvement.  What I would like to know is an
>    approximate "average" comparison for routine analyses and
>    bootstrapping, for example.

Almost all those comments were about obselete versions, that is prior to
5.1. I would not say 5.1 is faster (the claims for very large problems,
perhaps unrealistically large ones) but it is not much slower (e.g. for
bootstrapping). I can't give exact comparisons as some things work in
different versions, but for the V&R3 scripts the ratio of speed 3.4:5.1 is
from about 1:0.25 to 1:1.2. As a ballpark figure, I'd say 5.2 is 2.5x
slower, using twice as much memory.

Remember that some users (e.g. Linux) only have access to 5.x.

Brian

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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