maxima is 100 times slower than maple



Such comparisons depend on the selected problem very much. Several years 
ago, the speeds of sparce polynomial multiplication by various CASs were 
compared:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fateman/papers/fastmult.pdf

Namely, the polynomial (1+x+y+z)^20 (expanded) was multiplied by itself. 
And maxima (compiled with cmucl; sbcl should not differ much) was several 
times faster than maple. Reduce was fastest among general-purpose CASs, 
Mathematica was slowest. True, the versions of all CASs were rather old; 
it would be interesting to repeat this benchmarking with more modern 
versions.

Andrey