Speed tests for R — and a look at the compiler

I’ve gotten back to work on speeding up R, starting with improving my suite of speed tests.  Among other new features, this suite allows one to easily try out the “byte-code” compiler that is now a standard part of the latest release of R, version 2.13.0. You can get the suite here.

I’ve been running these tests on my new workstation, which has a six-core Intel X5680 processor, running at 3.33GHz.  Unfortunately, it’s clear that thing runs somewhat slower when you use all the cores at once, so for consistency one needs to do the speed tests using just one core.  (Or one needs some more elaborate, and unclear, protocol for testing the speed of R in a muticore environment.)  I haven’t figured out how to get Red Hat Linux to compile 32-bit applications yet, so all the tests are in a 64-bit environment.

I’ve started with comparing the speed of R-2.13.0 with and without functions being compiled, and with comparing R-2.13.0 (without the compiler) to R-2.11.1, which was the last release before some of my speed improvements were incorporated.  A plot of the results is here.