Issue 19199: Remove PyThreadState.tick_counter field (original) (raw)

This issue has been migrated to GitHub: https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/63398

classification

process

Created on 2013-10-08 21:18 by vstinner, last changed 2022-04-11 14:57 by admin. This issue is now closed.

Messages (8)
msg199256 - (view)	Author: STINNER Victor (vstinner) *	Date: 2013-10-08 21:18
The C structure "PyThreadState" has a counter which is incremented in the bytecode evaluation loop (ceval.c), but never used. /* XXX doesn't mean anything anymore (the comment below is obsolete) => deprecate or remove? */ /* tick_counter is incremented whenever the check_interval ticker * reaches zero. The purpose is to give a useful measure of the number * of interpreted bytecode instructions in a given thread. This * extremely lightweight statistic collector may be of interest to * profilers (like psyco.jit()), although nothing in the core uses it. */ int tick_counter; Antoine Pitrou added the XXX comment when he merged the "new GIL" of Python 3.2. Can we now remove it?
msg199257 - (view)	Author: Antoine Pitrou (pitrou) *	Date: 2013-10-08 21:19
Yes, we can :)
msg199259 - (view)	Author: STINNER Victor (vstinner) *	Date: 2013-10-08 21:26
Here is a patch. I'm going to commit it in one week if nobody complains.
msg199261 - (view)	Author: R. David Murray (r.david.murray) *	Date: 2013-10-08 21:38
Should there be a mention in whats new in case any external tools are (still) looking at it and thinking it is meaningful?
msg199262 - (view)	Author: STINNER Victor (vstinner) *	Date: 2013-10-08 21:47
PyThreadState.tick_counter field was added in 2002 by Armin Rigo: see issue #617311. "A very very small statistic-collecting patch. (...) The purpose is to give a useful measure of the number of interpreted bytecode instructions in a given thread." My patch will probably break the following module :-) http://packages.ubuntu.com/fr/lucid/python-tickcount "Python C extension module giving access to the internal tickcounter of python. This is useful for certain forms of profiling or performance analysis." (But tickcounter was meanless since Python 3.2.) The PyThreadState.tick_counter field was mentionned in the following question: "Read how many Python instructions have been interpreted?" http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16437487/read-how-many-python-instructions-have-been-interpreted Should we add a new counter to count the number of executed Python instructions per thread? Or fix tick_counter? Does we really need such counter or other profilers (cProfile) are enough?
msg199263 - (view)	Author: Antoine Pitrou (pitrou) *	Date: 2013-10-08 21:51
> Should we add a new counter to count the number of executed Python > instructions per thread? Or fix tick_counter? Let's just drop it. It's useless and nobody complained.
msg199279 - (view)	Author: Armin Rigo (arigo) *	Date: 2013-10-09 09:43
Better remove this field if its value is now useless anyway. If someone needs it again for a similar reason, he can contribute a patch like I did in 2002 :-)
msg199293 - (view)	Author: Roundup Robot (python-dev)	Date: 2013-10-09 12:53
New changeset 3ce0102e4c1f by Victor Stinner in branch 'default': Close #19199: Remove ``PyThreadState.tick_counter`` field http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/3ce0102e4c1f