[Python-Dev] Re: a serious threat to 2.3's speed? (original) (raw)

Michael Hudson mwh at python.net
Fri Dec 12 09:29:06 EST 2003

"Delaney, Timothy C (Timothy)" <tdelaney at avaya.com> writes:

From: Fredrik Lundh

key features contributing to this is true gc, call-site caching, and "traditional" (C-style) argument passing for common cases. Did you collect stats on how much garbage collection actually occurred during the tests? How did it compare to stock CPython? One of the big flaws in benchmarking early versions of Java of course was that most tests didn't end up invoking the garbage collector - hence showing an artificially good result that could not be observed in real-world usage.

If you read the pytte1 pages you can find /F talking about how accidentally disabling the GC wrecked performance. My suspicion is that Python apps allocate and deallocate so many objects that not having a GC around leads to ferociously cache hostile behaviour.

Cheers, mwh

-- Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly. -- Simeon Strunsky

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