On Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:11:57 -0800, Michael G Schwern <schwern@pobox.com> wrote: > On 2011.11.16 10:56 AM, Reini Urban wrote: > > 5.6 is fast and almost never wrong compared to 5.14. With higher perls > > it is even much easier to get wrong results, because of more > > unexpected magic happening behind, more dependency bloat and less > > experienced hackers working on it. > > As much as I love unconstructively pining for old, broken versions of Perl > (how's that 5.6 Unicode working?) and having a Zero Sum development philosophy > (ie. to fix bugs and add features you have to slow things down), it occurs to > me that we could do something about it. > > I'm inspired by Firefox's [1] performance boosting sub-projects [2] like > MemShrink [3] to suggest a similar drive for Perl 5. > > * Make a realistic benchmark suite of both performance and memory [4] > * Set up a smoker to the benchmarks and report significant differences > and performance creeps to p5p, like with tests I know we're slow on this, but the new setup of Test::Smoke will store all core test run times in the database, so one can select runs for the same machine and compare them over time. > Then at least we know how fast (or slow) we're getting. Then we can do and > publish some information on why things are slow. > > * Information on how to build with profiling and using it > * Published profile analysis of various benchmarks > * Examine and publish sources of subroutine call performance issues > > And try some concrete ways to get faster. > > * Adapt for llvm (or whatever optimizing compiler) > * Get copy-on-write working > * Release memory more often > * Fix circular memory handling > * Combine op codes > > > [1] Let's just pretend you all complained about Firefox and advocated your > favorite browser and skip that part because it's NOT THE POINT > > [2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/ > > [3] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink > > [4] perlbench, while an admirable start, does not cut it -- H.Merijn Brand http://tux.nl Perl Monger http://amsterdam.pm.org/ using 5.00307 through 5.14 and porting perl5.15.x on HP-UX 10.20, 11.00, 11.11, 11.23 and 11.31, OpenSuSE 10.1, 11.0 .. 11.4 and AIX 5.2 and 5.3. http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/ http://www.test-smoke.org/ http://qa.perl.org http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/