Recently I looked into some ways to speed up a calculation in R (the Rayleigh Quotient is the example). I wanted to look at the byte-code compiler too. As a way of making notes I embedded my attempts in a knitR (.Rnw) file. The resulting pdf is linked from the Rwiki at http://rwiki.sciviews.org/doku.php?id=tips:rqcasestudy. R users may find the examples helpful. John Nash