Message 62590 - Python tracker (original) (raw)

My conclusions from the testing I've just reported:

• there are some contradictory results which make little (obvious) sense, but the testing has been repeated a number of times and nearly all tests repeat to with 1%;
• leave the int freelist as is, but move the compaction into gc.collect() as suggested by tiran in a python-dev posting;
• keep the small int cache (it may profitably be increased to cover a wider range of ints, perhaps -256..1024?? - more testing required);
• the float freelist and float LIFO, while being attractive in micro-benchmarks, are not useful enough to keep in large scale usage. This is especially the case when you consider that floats are much less prevalent than ints in a wide range of Python programs. Serious float users gravitate to Numpy and other extensions in most cases, and the simpler memory profile has its own attractions.