A quick scan though the mailing list archives didn't reveal any reference to this article, so here goes: http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/archives/2006/05/16/36/ In response to a criticism of OS X, a diligent blogger examined a claim that it was an inherently slow operating system. The application in question was R, and the results were... "Linux uses ptmalloc, which is a thread-safe implemenation based on Doug Lea?s allocator (Sekhon?s test is single threaded, incidentally). R also uses the Lea allocator on Windows instead of the default Windows malloc. But on Mac OS X, it uses the default allocator." ... and ... "If you use the same allocator on Mac OS X that R uses on Windows, the performance differences all but disappear." Would it make sense for the build process that generates R binaries for OS X to use the Lea allocator? Jason Foster
Jason, On May 19, 2006, at 6:37 PM, Jason Foster wrote:> A quick scan though the mailing list archives didn't reveal any > reference to this articleSomehow you managed to miss it, we had a discussion about this quite recently: http://www.mail-archive.com/r-sig-mac%40stat.math.ethz.ch/msg00770.html Also based on private e-mail exchange with all involved parties the preliminary answer is no. The mentioned speed-up occurred only after patching the involved code, R was actually not even modified. It is still unclear whether a modification of R is safe and whether any speed up is to be expected. I hope to have a quiet minute during the weekend so I can test the various hypotheses... (There are two separate issues to be addressed: system malloc/free and BLAS performance). Cheers, Simon> [...] > > Would it make sense for the build process that generates R binaries > for OS X to use the Lea allocator? > > Jason Foster > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel at r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > >