plot() command broken in Octave version 3.0.0 for Red Hat Enterprise?

[John W. Eaton]

On 12-Feb-2008, Rick Niles wrote:

| Finally, I'm running on a very beefy machine it's takes almost 45 
| seconds to start octave and about 10 seconds to execute "plot([1 2 3])"
| 
| octave:1> tic;plot([1 2 3]);toc
| Elapsed time is 7.16495 seconds.
| (note after the Elapsed time prints it's still another three seconds 
| before anything goes to the plot)
| 
| What's up with this slowness?  We have a whole bunch of NFS mounts, 
| maybe it's an I/O issue?

That would be my guess.  Is the gnuplot binary located on an NFS
mount?  Are you running the Octave and gnuplot processes locally, or
remotely with only the display local?

I don't see this problem here, but I have all local disks.  I see

  octave:1> tic;plot([1 2 3]);toc
  Elapsed time is 0.254016 seconds.

and the gnuplot window pops up a fraction of a second later.  It also
only takes a fraction of second to start Octave.

Maybe do an strace of Octave when it starts?  Is it doing too many
stat calls (or similar), or are they just taking a long time to
complete?  There was a problem similar to this reported around two
years ago.  I thought we eliminated most of the unnecessary calls to
stat when Octave is looking for files.

jwe