What is the prefered OS for Matlab 2012a

Is there a prefered OS for Matlab 2012a? is it windows 7 - 64 bit or is it Windows XP - 64 bit.

Which will give better performance if there is a difference?

My application is data processing large text files having millions of records

Answer 1

[Daniel Shub]

You may want to take a look at the system requirement roadmap, although it seems to be more historical than predictive.

Basically, for R2012a both Windows 7 and Windows XP are fully supported (along with a number of other OSs). There are some toolboxes that also have OS dependencies.

Answer 2

[Andreas Goser]

I would not expect performance difference between the two enviroments. In general, my experience ist that most of the performance issues can be resolved by formulating the problem small enough to meet the goal instead of formulating it as large as possible with the given software and hardware.

Answer 3

[Jan]

The support of WinXP is dropped in April'14. Without updates the computer will flooded by trojans and viruses soon, which will dominate the performance.

So if the code runs for a few months only, WinXP might be faster, because you can disable more features of the OS. But e.g. the lack of efficient 64-bit graphic drivers for XP can change the situation: Then the CPU wastes time the the graphic output and this time is missed for the calculations.

My choice would be Win7: Perhaps I loose some seconds of runtime, but I save hours for maintenance and upgrading in the spring.

As far as I remember Linux systems run Matlab programs substantially faster.