[Python-Dev] Python 3 optimizations continued... (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Tue Aug 30 05:29:59 CEST 2011

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 12:38 PM, Gregory P. Smith <greg at krypto.org> wrote:

Some in this thread seemed to give the impression that CPython performance is not something to care about. I disagree. I see CPython being the main implementation of Python used in most places for a long time. Improving its performance merely raises the bar to be met by other implementations if they want to compete. That is a good thing!

Not the impression I intended to give. I merely want to highlight that we need to be careful that incremental increases in complexity are justified with real, measured performance improvements. PyPy has set the bar on how to do that - people that seriously want to make CPython faster need to focus on getting speed.python.org sorted first (so we know where we're starting) and then work on trying to improve CPython's numbers relative to that starting point.

The PSF has the hardware to run the site, but, unless more has been going in the background than I am aware of, is still lacking trusted volunteers to do the following:

  1. Getting codespeed up and running on the PSF hardware
  2. Hooking it in to the CPython source control infrastructure
  3. Getting a reasonable set of benchmarks running on 3.x (likely starting with the already ported set in Mercurial, but eventually we want the full suite that PyPy uses)
  4. Once PyPy, Jython and IronPython offer 3.x compatible versions, start including them as well (alternatively, offer 2.x performance comparisons as well, although that's less interesting from a CPython point of view since it can't be used to guide future CPython optimisation efforts)

Anecdotal, non-reproducible performance figures are not the way to go about serious optimisation efforts. Using a dedicated machine is vulnerable to architecture-specific idiosyncracies, but ad hoc testing on other systems can still be used as a sanity check.

Regards, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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