[R] Spedd: R vs S-plus

[Uwe Ligges]

(Ted Harding) wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> Sorry to raise what has probably been discussed before,
> but I an repeatedly struck by the comparative slowness
> of S-plus for Windows compared with R for Linux when doing
> much the same thing.
> 
> I don't have a direct comparison, because they're not
> running on the same machine; but machine W has a faster
> CPU and more RAM than machine L, yet S-plus on W seems
> to take longer by quite a big factor (of the order of 5x)
> than R on L.
> 
> My instincts say that "WIndows" is probably a significant
> factor in the comnparison, but still ...
> 
> Ideally, to compare R with S-plus, one should look at them
> both on the same OS (Unix or Windows) on the same machine.
> 
> Can anyone give me clean comparative speeds?

It heavily depends on what you are doing, and on the versions of R and 
S-PLUS.

Given you do not link R against very specialized libraries such as ATLAS 
on one and not the other OS, I found no dramatic differences between R 
on Linux and Windows, but that might depend on the application as well.

Uwe Ligges