Dear Nicola,
The slow performance under windows is probably due to the old DLLs in the
SPM99 distribution you downloaded (or are tha fast DLLs included by now?).
They were compiled using relatively old compilers, that do not take into
account several enhancements of newer (pentium) CPUs. Chris Rordon mailed to
the list that the c-source code was recompiled to new DLLs taking into
account newer CPUs, and released them for download. See the maillist
archive:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0206&L=spm&P=R9736&I=-1
In my case these DLLs made SPM99 about 2 times faster.
Apart from the DLLs, RAM memory made the biggest difference for me. It
helped plugging extra RAM into my Windos box, but we now combined our
resources here and set up a Linux server (RH 8.0), with about 1.5 GB of RAM,
and that speeded up SPM99 even more (most likely due to the RAM). Desktop or
Laptop shouldnt make that much of a difference.
Severel SPMers did extensive benchmarking for SPM & Matlab under numerous
platforms. For more info on this search the archives using the keyword
'benchmark'.
Kind regards,
Bas
--------------------------------------------
Dr. S.F.W. Neggers
dept. of Psychonomics,Helmholtz Institute
Utrecht University
Heidelberglaan 2
3584 CS, Utrecht, the Netherlands
Tel: (+31) 30 253 4582
Fax: (+31) 30 253 4511
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.fss.uu.nl/psn/pionier
--------------------------------------------
-----Original Message-----
From: Nicola Canessa [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: zondag 30 maart 2003 20:25
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: SPM with linux vs. SPM with windows
Dear SPMers,
I'm estimating a very simple model (one subject, four sessions, each
composed by six conditions and by 138 scans), but I'm quite surprised by
the slowness of the process: only 45% after almost 8 hours!!
I'm using Spm99,working on Matlab R12 under Windows XP, on a laptop with
752 Mb of ddr Ram and an Athlon Xp 2000+ processor.
I've already estimated similar models on a desktop Pentium 4 2GHZ, with 512
Mb Ram on Matlab 6 under linux (Slaqware), and the whole process took not
more than 20/30 minutes...
So I was wondering if the problem is in the hardware (is a laptop so much
slower than a desktop?) or in the operating system (is matlab/Spm so much
slower under Windows XP than under Linux?) (or perhaps a combination of the
two?).
Thanks in advance for any suggestion,
Nick
****************************************************
Nicola Canessa
Institute of Human Physiology,
University of Parma,
Via Volturno 39, 43100, Parma, Italy
Phone: +39 0521 903847
http://www.unipr.it/~mirror
San Raffaele Research Institute,
Via Olgettina 58,
20132, Milano, Italy
http://www.sanraffaele.org
****************************************************
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