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Re: Perl Performance Project? (was: Re: The end of 5.6 is nigh!)

From:
H.Merijn Brand
Date:
November 16, 2011 23:17
Subject:
Re: Perl Performance Project? (was: Re: The end of 5.6 is nigh!)
Message ID:
20111117081659.62830069@pc09.procura.nl
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/



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