Re: [Gretl-devel] sluggish on winxp
On Wed, 17 Feb 2010, Hélio Guilherme wrote:
I did also installed 1.8.7cvs in Windows XP and notice this
large delay in starting gnuplot.
Didn't it used to leave a gnuplot console window opened?
No, gretl has never used a gnuplot console; we call gnuplot
non-interactively to create a PNG file, which we then display in a
GTK window that is under gretl's control.
I checked the Preferences page and there is not a field to use a
different gnuplot installation. Would this be an option?
Definitely not. There's nothing wrong with the build of gnuplot
that is in the gretl package for Windows, and it is optimized for
use with gretl.
The slowness of the first appearance of a gretl/gnuplot graph (and
please note, it's only the first appearance of a graph in a gretl
session) is almost surely a Windows issue.
I'd like to raise a more general question about the "sluggishness
of gretl on Windows" issue that Sven brought up. We're
econometricians, right? So we'd like to see evidence. Has anyone
tested the speed of current gretl against, say, gretl 1.8.0 or
1.7.0 -- or whatever version represents the good old days before
things supposedly slowed down -- on a current Windows
installation?
I'd be interested in the results of such a test, and if current
gretl really is appreciably slower than old gretl on the same
machine and OS then I'd be motivated to spend some time trying
to figure out why that might be. But right now I have no evidence,
and I can't think of any reason why it should be so, on the
gretl/GTK side. (On the other hand, I can think of several reasons
why MS Windows itself might have slowed down, on a given machine
-- from general corruption of the OS with age, to the effects of
successive security patches, to capture by a botnet.)
Allin.