[Python-Dev] PyDict_SetItem hook (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Fri Apr 3 11:27:40 CEST 2009

Thomas Wouters <thomas python.org> writes:

Pystone is pretty much a useless benchmark. If it measures anything, it's the speed of the bytecode dispatcher (and it doesn't measure it particularly well.) PyBench isn't any better, in my experience.

I don't think pybench is useless. It gives a lot of performance data about crucial internal operations of the interpreter. It is of course very little real-world, but conversely makes you know immediately where a performance regression has happened. (by contrast, if you witness a regression in a high-level benchmark, you still have a lot of investigation to do to find out where exactly something bad happened)

Perhaps someone should start maintaining a suite of benchmarks, high-level and low-level; we currently have them all scattered around (pybench, pystone, stringbench, richard, iobench, and the various Unladen Swallow benchmarks; not to mention other third-party stuff that can be found in e.g. the Computer Language Shootout).

I also know Gregory P. Smith had emitted the idea of plotting benchmark figures for each new revision of trunk or py3k (and, perhaps, other implementations), but I don't know if he's willing to do it himself :-)

Regards

Antoine.

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