I agree with your take on Octave performance relative to Matlab. The Matlab parallel toolbox is getting more and more useful in a multicore world. As you note

I agree with your take on Octave performance relative to Matlab. The Matlab parallel toolbox is getting more and more useful in a multicore world. As you note, the Matlab profiler is very nice. You can zero in on the 80% of the 80/20 tradeoff very fast, during your usual development cycle. It's as simple as: >> profile on >> do_something >> profile report and you get a nice graphical/textual report on time usage in everything do_something called.