[Python-Dev] memcmp performance (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Thu Oct 20 23:08:48 CEST 2011

Hello,

I have been doing some performance experiments with memcmp, and I was surprised that memcmp wasn't faster than it was in Python.  I did a whole,  long analysis and came up with some very simple results.

Before I put in a tracker bug report, I wanted to present my findings and make sure they were repeatable to others (isn't that the nature of science? ;)   as well as offer discussion.

Thanks for the analysis. Non-bugfix work now happens on Python 3, where the str type is Python 2's unicode type. Your recommendations would have to be revisited under that light.

Have you reported gcc's "outdated optimization" issue to them? Or is it already solved in newer gcc versions?

Under glibc-based systems, it seems we can't go wrong with the system memcpy function. If gcc doesn't get in the way, that is.

Regards

Antoine.

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