Comparing the speed of pqR with R-2.15.0 and R-3.0.1

As part of developing pqR, I wrote a suite of speed tests for R. Some of these tests were used to show how pqR speeds up simple real programs in my post announcing pqR, and to show the speed-up obtained with helper threads in pqR on systems with multiple processor cores.

However, most tests in the suite are designed to measure the speed of more specific operations. These tests provide insight into how much various modifications in pqR have improved speed, compared to R-2.15.0 on which it was based, or to the current R Core release, R-3.0.1. These tests may also be useful in judging how much you would expect your favourite R program to be sped up using pqR, based on what sort of operations the program does.

Below, I’ll present the results of these tests, discuss a bit what some of the tests are doing, and explain some of the run time differences. I’ll also look at the effect of “byte-code” compilation, in both pqR and the R Core versions of R.