/sci/ - Science & Math

Is this the right place to ask for Matlab advice or would /g/ be a better fit? I'm trying to do something very basic (solve differential equation of something orbiting around the sun) but I need time scales of about 10k years. When I do it for 100 years the calculation takes 6 seconds, for 1000 years it goes up to 120 seconds and I haven't yet completed calculations for 10k years. Are there tricks to make it faster when I can't sacrifice more accuracy? Is Matlab better than Octave for this kind of stuff?