Oracle R, Hash Table Results, And VIM To The Rescue

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Downloaded and installed Solaris 11.2 on my laptop, and WOW! That was a throwback to the late 90’s! Old version of GNOME, no truetype fonts so the whole visual experience was very pixelly. Firefox was installed but every website I visited yelled, “YOU’RE RUNNING AN OLD BROWSER!!! UPGRADE NOW!”

The purpose was to benchmark hash table performance with the Oracle R Distribution 3.1.1, and well, I had to fix something first.

In the BENCHMARK.sh file, I make a call out to Rscript to gather some hash table sizes. Problem was that Rscript just would not run. It’s a binary file, and I kinda knew what was going on since Rscript complained it couldn’t find something. I didn’t capture the error message to show you, but I got a screenshot of VIM fixing the problem:

VIM Rescues ORD

The Rscript binary fixed the location of the temporary installed path to the R lib in /tmp/Rinstall/R/lib/R! Agh! No worries, VIM is a capable binary editor and all I had to do was create a symbolic link the same length as the temporary lib path and point it to the real lib path which was /usr/lib/64/R. I named it /usr/lib/64/Really__R.

On to the disappointing results.

Oracle R on Solaris X64, and everyone else

DISTINCT.1mil

DISTINCT.500thou

SKEW.1mil

Read into those what you will. The Oracle results were run on Solaris x64 while the others were run on RedHat. I’m no Solaris expert, but I don’t think performance will get any better even on Sparc.

Rather, based on this the real reason to run software on Solaris is because it’s not Linux, and that can matter if you want security through obscurity since Linux is the most attacked UNIX.

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