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slowness on linux

To: "S-PLUS Newsgroup (E-mail)" <s-news@lists.biostat.wustl.edu>
Subject: slowness on linux
From: Winifred Lambert <lambert.winifred@ensco.com>
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 11:37:41 -0500
All,

I am running a trial version of S-PLUS 6 on Red Hat Linux release 7.0
(Guinness)
Kernel 2.2.16-35lfssmp on a 2-processor i686.  The processors are
Pentium III 933 MHz/ 512 RAM with 2 per node, 16 nodes in all (i.e. 32
processors).  It's a big, tall, black machine with lots of flashing
green lights that we nicknamed 'HAL', but its system name is Thor to
match our workstation nameing convention.  But, I digress.  Suffice to
say, its a powerful and fast machine.  All tests of our other software
packages indicate much faster performance.

We recieved a demo version of S-PLUS 6 for Linux from Insightful because
their HP version would not work on our UNIX workstations.  The S-PLUS
GUI and command lines seem to work on the Linux system, but are
*excrutiatingly* slow.  I am starting a project in which I will be
working with 7 years of data collected every 5 minutes at 52 locations
and at several heights at each location.  In other words, the data files
are huge.

As a test, I imported one 5 MB file into a data frame consisting of 15
columns and 62,900 rows.  It took over 2 minutes to import, and when I
tried to look at it through the new data viewer S-Plus locked up and I
had to end the program through the Task Manager.  It typed the data
frame name on the command line to view it that way, and it took over 3
minutes to output it.  I can do calculations and other manipulations to
the data frame, but they take a long time.

I cross-checked this with MS Excel and S-PLUS 2000 on my PC (400 MHz,
Windows 2000, 384 RAM - less powerful than even 1 processor on our Linux
system).  It took less than a minute to import the file into an Excel
spreadsheet, and even less time to import it into an S-PLUS dataframe.
The data were displayed *very* quickly when I typed the name of the
dataframe at the command line, and manipulation of the data in both
packages was quicker than on the Linux system.

I checked the object.size on the Linux version and it is set to Inf.
Are there any other memory things I should check?  Has anyone else
experienced this on Linux?  ANY advice is appreciated.  The Linux
version *should* be running circles around the PC version given all the
computing power available to it.

Win

*************************************************
Winifred C. Lambert            Senior Scientist/Meteorologist
ENSCO, Inc.
Aerospace Sciences and Engineering Division
1980 N Atlantic Ave, Suite 230
Cocoa Beach, FL  32931
VOICE:  321.853.8130           FAX:  321.853.8415
lambert.winifred@ensco.com

AMU Quarterly Reports are available online:
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/amu/home.html
*************************************************
 

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