On Axelsson's perturbations (Q1080620)

A nice perturbation technique was introduced by \textit{O. Axelsson} [BIT 12, 443-467 (1972; Zbl 0256.65046)] and further developed by \textit{I. Gustafsson} [ibid. 18, 142-156 (1978; Zbl 0386.65006)] to prove that factorization iterative methods are able, under appropriate conditions, to reach a convergence rate larger by an order of magnitude than that of classical schemes. Gustafsson observed however that the perturbations introduced to prove this result seemed actually unnecessary to reach it in practice. In the present work, on the basis of eigenvalue bounds recently obtained by the author, we offer an alternative approach which brings a partial confirmation of Gustafsson's conjecture.