Allin Cottrell schrieb:
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?
First of all, I mostly use gretl on Linux, so it's not a big deal for
me. Second, I don't know how this could be tested, because it's about
responsiveness; what I noticed is sometimes a delay of let's say half a
second when opening a window. Actually, when it happens it feels a bit
like a GUI program in an interpreted language (e.g. Python), you know
not really bad, but noticeably slower. (Leave aside the gnuplot startup
thing.) Third, it's not fully deterministic, right now for example I
don't see these (small) problems.
But I sent the message because subjectively it seemed to me to be a
clearly recent behavior. However, I cannot say exactly at which version
it happened, for the above reason that I'm mostly on Linux.
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.)
I can't offer a proof, but with other applications I haven't noticed any
speed or responsiveness changes. So I doubt it's a generally screwed
windows installation, I think it must be something more subtle.
All in all, I'm not sure if it's worth digging deeper here -- so far it
seems other people only see the gnuplot startup delay, right?
thanks,
sven