On Wed, 30 Apr 2008, Maarten Blaauw wrote:
The now default Cairo results in much prettier graphs, but dense graphs such
as plot(rnorm(1e4)) take considerably longer to plot than using
X11(type="Xlib"). This has already been mentioned, but I was wondering if we
users could expect Cairo speed increases in the near future?
Some. As Michael Lawrence has already said, cairo speed is an issue and
unlilkely to improve any time soon. And anti-aliasing takes some CPU time.
What we can do is to reduce the information passing between R and the X
server. I already have timer-based double buffering running (the same
scheme as on Windows), and that helps a lot in the circumstances mentioned
(lots of small symbols). There are some event-loop-interface issues to
sort out before it get committed to R-devel.
type="nbcairo" is likely to be faster in your example, but not as fast as
the buffered device planned for 2.8.0.
The X11 server does make quite a difference -- I am running fairly decent
Nvidia cards with the Nvidia X server module, and that has much higher
performance than the vanilla one that Fedora ships.
In the end the reason we offer a choice of types is that there are
different needs on the quality vs speed axis.
Slower under some circumstances (although on the test systems much faster
than packages Cairo and cairoDevice). This will be particularly true for
X11() with a slow connection between the machine running R and the X server.
Using R 2.7.0 on Ubuntu 8.04 (Pentium 4 1.70 GHz on one machine and Centrino
Duo on another)
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