[Python-Dev] IronPython Performance (original) (raw)

Brent Fulgham bfulg at pacbell.net
Sat Apr 22 01:01:54 CEST 2006

A while ago (nearly two years) an interesting paper was published by Jim Hugunin (http://www.python.org/pycon/dc2004/papers/9/) crowing about the significant speed advantage observed in this interpreter running on top of Microsoft's .NET VM stack. I remember being surprised by these results, as Python has always seemed fairly fast for an interpreted language.

I've been working on the Programming Language Shootout for a few years now, and after growing tired of the repeated requests to include scores for IronPython I finally added the implementation this week.

Comparison of IronPython (1.0 Beta 5) to Python 2.4.3 [1] and IronPython (1.0 Beta 1) to Python 2.4.2 [2] do not match the results reported in the 2004 paper. In fact, IronPython is consistenly 3 to 4 times slower (in some cases worse than that), and seemed to suffer from recursion/stack limitations.

Since the shootout runs on a Debian Linux box, I was not able to use Microsoft's CLR; instead, I was pleased to find that Mono successfully ran most of the Shootout testing suite. The 1.0 Beta 1 version of IronPython was built using the compiler chain that ships with Mono 1.1.13.6; the 1.0 Beta 5 version is an 'official' build from the IronPython download site running on Mono 1.1.13.4.

I am aware of the following issues that might affect the results:

  1. Mono vs. Microsoft's CLR.
  2. Python 2.1 vs. Python 2.4
  3. Changes in IronPython over the last two years.

In addition, there is a small startup cost paid by IronPython since the py_compile libraries were not present in the IronPython beta, preventing me from precompiling the *.py files to *.pyo. However, most of our benchmarks are now sufficiently long that initial startup costs are less significant.

I thought these findings might be interesting to some of the Python, IronPython, and Mono developers. Let the flames begin! ;-)

-Brent

=============================================================== Current results for Python versus IronPython are posted here: [1] http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all〈=iron&lang2=python [2] http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all〈=iron&lang2=python

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