[Python-Dev] Compiling Python on Linux with Intel's icc (original) (raw)

Alex Leach albl500 at york.ac.uk
Fri Mar 2 17:29:39 CET 2012

On 02/03/2012 14:52, "Antoine Pitrou" <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

Did you compare the actual code sizes? The size command can help you with that.

I'd never used size before... Thanks for the tip; looks like the Intel build is actually smaller..? :/

ICC version (ls -lh ==> 4.7MB)

$ size ./python text data bss dec hex filename 1659760 276904 63760 2000424 1e8628 ./python

System version (ls -lhH ==>2.7MB)

$ size /usr/bin/python text data bss dec hex filename 2303805 427728 74808 2806341 2ad245 /usr/bin/python

I definitely don't get what's going on here! Does this information relate to linked objects being in shared or static libs? Is this indicative anything, either good or bad?

That's an extremely silly benchmark, unlikely to be representative of any actual Python workload. I suggest you try a less-trivial benchmark suite, such as: http://hg.python.org/benchmarks/

lol, yes it is a silly benchmark! Still, when I first started compiling python, without any optimisation options, this silly little script took up to 6-8x more time to process than the default GCC version. (~17s cf. <3s). And the script hardly took that long to write!

Thanks for the benchmark recommendation; I'll use that on the next build - hopefully after passing the math tests!

Cheers, Alex

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