Some benchmarking

Hello.

Recently, thanks to the surprisingly helpful Unhelpful, also known as Andrew Mahone, we have a decent, if slightly arbitrary, set of performances graphs. It contains a couple of benchmarks already seen on this blog as well as some taken from The Great Computer Language Benchmarks Game. These benchmarks don't even try to represent "real applications" as they're mostly small algorithmic benchmarks. Interpreters used:

1. PyPy trunk, revision 69331 with --translation-backendopt-storesink, which is now on by default
2. Unladen swallow trunk, r900
3. CPython 2.6.2 release

Here are the graphs; the benchmarks and the runner script are available

And zoomed in for all benchmarks except binary-trees and fannkuch.

As we can see, PyPy is generally somewhere between the same speed as CPython to 50x faster (f1int). The places where we're the same speed as CPython are places where we know we have problems - for example generators are not sped up by the JIT and they require some work (although not as much by far as generators & Psyco :-). The glaring inefficiency is in the regex-dna benchmark. This one clearly demonstrates that our regular expression engine is really, really, bad and urgently requires attention.

The cool thing here is, that although these benchmarks might not represent typical python applications, they're not uninteresting. They show that algorithmic code does not need to be far slower in Python than in C, so using PyPy one need not worry about algorithmic code being dramatically slow. As many readers would agree, that kills yet another usage of C in our lives :-)

Cheers,
fijal