From help-request at octave dot org Tue Feb 22 20:18:17 2005 Subject: Re: False alarm (Re: reshape slowdown?) From: "Dmitri A. Sergatskov" To: David dot Bateman at motorola dot com CC: help-Octave , Laurent Mazet Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 19:21:24 -0700 David Bateman wrote: > Dmitri, > > It seems you've fall on the same problem as my colleague Laurent came > across, though he identified it as happening with the fft function I > believe. In any case I came confirm this is an issue... Though last I > heard Laurent was as lost as you. > I know what is the problem now. I do not know how to solve it. The problem is that when running in SMP mode the task is bouncing between two CPUs flushing the caches. That can be verified booting in UP mode. I had this problem some 5 years ago (in the time of kernel 2.2). Back then the problem was hardware dependent -- I had two SMP system (one intel 440BX and another 440 LX). The problem was with some compiled C code which would run significantly slower on LX while in SMP mode but almost the same speed in UP mode. One could also see significantly more system time when time the task (in BX system most time was a user time). I had some exchange with Alan Cox on the matter, and while he conferred the problem it was no easy solution. These systems are retired now... So on my system in UP mode: octave:1> a=rand(3000); octave:2> tic; b=a'; toc ans = 0.80099 Which is 3 times faster! I am trying to reproduce the problem with a simple standalone program, so I can bug RH people with it. If it is possible to strip out the matrix transpose code from octave, that would be great, but I tried and could not really make it. > Regards > David > Sincerely, Dmitri. -- ------------------------------------------------------------- Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL. Octave's home on the web: http://www.octave.org How to fund new projects: http://www.octave.org/funding.html Subscription information: http://www.octave.org/archive.html -------------------------------------------------------------