AW: Very slow ploting with gnu plot (windows)

[Schirmacher, Rolf]

Dear all,

I want to draw your attention back to this topic. It is not about printing, it 
is about the plotting speed. And: it seems as if the issue is caused by the 
graphics toolkits, and probably NOT by octave itself...

What we see is that the speed by which a plot is displayed on screen is 
severely slower with octave 3.6.2 MSVC compared to 3.2.4 mingw. It seems to be 
related to gnuplot (and perhaps the communication with gnuplot?). FLTK response 
is very fast compared to gnuplot.

A good test case showing the issue is to plot a 400 kSample noise signal by

plot(rand(400000,1))

In this case, the 3.2.4 mingw gnuplot is about 4 times faster with the display 
on our environment...

By looking around I also found  
http://ea.tl/2011/01/21/gnuplot-performance-on-windows/ saying that gnuplot is 
about 5 times faster on cygwin ...

So, what did change in between 3.2.4 and is there any hope to get back with the 
performance? 

Actually, this issue is making colleagues ask for matlab instead of octave as 
plotting got so slow with the new version. And as we still see some issue with 
special characters as äöü and fonts for plotting (warnings) and printing with 
fltk, as well as 'tex' mode rendering, so gnuplot is preferred here.

Thanks for any hint,

Rolf