To try to answer the actual question ....
I run x86_64 Linux and both 32-bit Windows XP and x64 Windows 7 on my
home desktop. So from years of experience of using the same hardware
on those OSes:
1) Generally Linux will be a bit faster, mainly because I do not
hobble it with --enable-R-shlib (the only way R can be built on
Windows). But the difference is small (5-20%).
2) Linux handles large amounts of memory (and especially swapping)
better, so the differences will be more if what you do is using nearly
all the address space or physical RAM of your computer.
3) Linux's process launch and disc access is many times faster, which
makes a big difference to R development work.
From your described usage I would expect you to see a worthwhile
performance gain -- it does matter what you are doing with R. It also
matters which database system.
On Fri, 18 Mar 2011, Brigid Mooney wrote:
I'm not trying to start a Windows vs. Linux debate, but I've been
using R on a Windows machine for a while, and was recently wondering
if R's performance would be faster on a Linux machine. And similarly,
if any incremental increase in processing speed would be worth the
time it would take me to migrate my entire system to Linux (including
a database that I access via an R package.)
I don't know how much it matters what R is doing - but I've got R
pulling a large amount data from a database, performing many complex
computations on that data, and then writing output data to a database.
Thanks so much for the input,
Brigid
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Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
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